Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not a good thing.

The Factory Reset process is defective. It SHOULD ask the user if they are selling, giving away, or otherwise disposing of the device; or otherwise just want to remove that device from their account.

View on HN

It does. "Erase all content and settings" prompts the user to enter their password to disable Find My iPhone, and if you do it through iTunes, once the phone reboots into the clean OS it prompts on the computer to type the credentials in. You could refuse to type the credentials in leaving it locked, but Apple is pretty informative throughout the process. (You can also remove it from Find My iPhone on the web and it unlocks the device even if you don't have it anymore)

Note that Android doesn't ask the same thing (and especially not if you initiate factory reset from the bootloader, as tech folks are prone to do).

This works well because pickpockets are well known for their inability to tell lies, and would always answer truthfully.

Sarcasm accepted, but you can require the account password to proceed with the reset when the user makes that choice.

It does. That is exactly what it does.

Good to know; but why are you and @swiftcoder saying apparently different things? [0]

I’m on iOS, so I can’t test this myself.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777197

He's talking about Android, I'm talking about iOS. I don't know what Android does, and I'm sure that it's device-specific anyway, unlike iPhones.

Ah, I thought what I was responding to was talking about Android. I can see now this was not necessarily the case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com