Five billion phones are dead in drawers – carriers want to mine them

I am guessing I am telling you the obvious when I tell you to backup all meaningful pictures and videos into whatever your long-term storage solution is (aka SSD or Cloud) before the phone inevitably dies and becomes inaccessible, especially if the phone memory is encrypted with some weird proprietary algo where you will never get the data off of it even if you know the password.

I found some old computers a while back, from the early 2000s. None of them booted. I couldn't get anything off even after pulling the HDs and connecting to them directly - everything was corrupted despite sitting in a fairly dry, clean, climate-controlled space.

The last thing I'd want to remember about my mother is her interactions with modern technology.

(I actually mean that, but I'm also attempting to be sorta funny)

> Locked boxes, chain of custody, secure transfer, cameras and two people in the room

It's difficult to see this being profitable. Or even possible, given the meagre training most carriers' employees at physical stores seem to have.

Easier: a device that shreds the phone onsite, in front of the customer.

Nudes are already being stolen from customer phones during phone repairs.

Don’t hand in your phone when there is any chance that data can be recovered.

If your phone can boot, wipe it.

If your phone cannot boot, remove the battery and then smash everything else into tiny little pieces with a hammer.

How about a portable shredder right in the store, with a nice big glass window on it? Bring your phones in and let your kid drop them in the shredder and watch the snap-crackle-pop, and get paid a nominal amount for each one!

> Most carriers should be able to put together an independently audited process to ensure your old data cannot be mined.

I don’t trust any carrier to do this honestly or competently. And I don’t have the time to audit their process.

I also don’t care enough to do a secure wipe but would gladly take out the storage card and destroy it. That way I’m certain.

It’s not that it’s not possible. It’s that I don’t think it’s worth the work for a negligible benefit.

Aren't a lot of carrier stores in reality franchises?

It’s a very low probability. I expect it to never happen, but it’s non-zero and easily mitigate-able for free by leaving it in a drawer.

Although I suspect someone will think it a fun project to sift through old storage devices found in the dump to automatically scan for photos of interest. Given the high interest in pornography, I expect the motivation of “found nudes” will lead to some discoveries no one ever thought possible.

If the alternatives are store forever, throw in the trash, or give to a carrier...

Nobody is getting the data off at my house. I assume nobody will go through the dump looking for old phones, but someone did go through the dump and found the ET cartridges, so there's prescedent. Also, I feel a little bad about putting phones directly in the dump.

If it goes to a carrier program, there's a good chance it goes into a repair process where the battery is replaced and maybe it works again. If it works again, I expect it to get the least intensive wipe required so that the user can get into the home screen, and then sold. That might mean the new user can get access to my data.

Story time: my spouse had an Amazon Fire phone for quite some time; when she was done with it, my dad needed a phone, but FireOS was a really poor choice, so I flashed it with a 3rd party Android build. Several years later, he ran it all the way out of battery, and when he got it charged up, somehow it booted up into FireOS instead and had my spouse's accounts and what not. Whoops. No big deal, we got him a new phone and got the Fire Phone back (and I tried to wipe it again, but better) and now it lives in a drawer and won't power on.

The bigger threat, imo, is a device that is still authenticated or trusted by some service I've forgotten about. A bank, email provider, Apple, etc. Yes, it's "easy" to fix any single one of these but hard to remember them all.

I'd be interested to find out how many of these bloated batteries still have any charge. Internal discharge feels like a pretty nice accidental safety feature, albeit at the price of also killing a lot of old devices.

But yeah, preemptively removing batteries for safety is a good move.

If the battery bloats up, it often helps undo the glue. Win-win

What kind of devices do you have that are unencrypted? Both Android and iOS have been encrypted by default for what must be a decade by now?

I've got a couple old Androids (MotoX and something else ~2015ish) that won't boot due to dead batteries. There's an endless loop of:

- Charge to ~.25%

- Phone automatically powers on

- The boot process takes more power than the charger can provide, so it drains the battery

- Automatically powers off because battery is back to 0%

I've had them on the charger for a few hours and watched this process repeat over and over. Short of disassembling and swapping the batteries I've tried everything I can think of to get them to power up

Not a significant benefit to me. I put that labor toward more productive things to better help with scarcity of resources.

As is so often the case, the perversity of the real world can be much larger than you expect. The average keyboard will simply reflect the wear pattern of English frequency... but there are keyboards in the world sitting on systems whose sole purpose in life is to accept password inputs, possibly from just one person, for a system that otherwise does everything via mouse. Could be merely hundreds of these in the world, but if one happens to be a very sensitive system, well, it isn't long before you end up with a policy to just smash everything to bits. Most hard drive sectors that get shredded have nothing of use on them either, but it's just not worth it to sit there and classify them rather than just toss them in to the shredder.

If you get a set of 10 likely characters instead of 40+, that's a big win and also a big threat.

Sort of. A lot of the logistics software was 10-key driven, so the alphanumeric part of the keyboard wasn't used for much but authentication.

Pinephone's battery is compatible with the one from J7 Samsung phone from 2015: https://beta.pine64.org/documentation/PinePhone/Battery/.

Not even just minor companies. I have an old Garmin bluetooth GPS receiver that uses a Nokia battery.

Absolutley true. However, the form factors really haven't changed that much in the last decade; at some point, it makes sense to standardize, even at the cost of further innovation.

I am absolutely grateful that my plumbing and electrical fittings are standardized. I'm grateful that most (old-school) electrical devices use the same four kinds of batteries, and get really frustrated at the coin-batteries that come in 20 something different sizes, because I almost never have the right size around. And I'm grateful that we charge almost all of our devices by a small number of USB connectors. Because standardization is also a boon to innovation, or rather, a lack of standardization can get in the way of innovating, especially at the level of interoperating services and hardware.

Not by that much, look at a phone battery soldered to a phone PCB today, it'll fit in most form factors. If there are a couple of different standardized sizes, it could fit anything, and also allow combinations of multiple.

Look at PC monitors: you can attach all kinds of monitors with different resolutions to PC's, and there exist some pretty exotic ones with eye trackers etc... too, and of course also various VR headsets can be connected too.

I dunno; if phones were more like PCs, you could have a screen on the front that was a fixed physical total size and connected via standard connectors and still have a lot of room for variations, up to and including changing the number of pixels in that fixed size. That would still fall down when faced with ex. in-screen fingerprint readers or maybe punch-hole cameras (and variations thereof) but the majority of phones don't have those so you'd still win overall.

I've rarely (... never?) retired a phone that was still usable enough to wipe it. Most could be repaired to a usable state, but at like 50% the cost of a new phone, so I just get a new one instead (since by then there are usually a bunch of other parts just waiting to go bad). Definitely not gonna spend that money so I can wipe them in order to recycle them.

That feels like pushing the costs onto the customer without actually solving the problems that impede it. Now you've just made it cost money to care about the privacy problems.

Yep, my dad kept his Nexus going till last year when he went to the states (had to switch to 4g).

I don't think there was much left of the original by then...

Better than a small paper tube on fire, I guess?

(lithium battery explosions are a lot rarer than accidental cigarette/clothing/hair fires used to be)

Is that vastly different from holding a bomb to your ear?

People used to do that with old school-house overhead projectors and shucked LCD monitors back when vga projectors were $$$.

We are talking about reusing for old phones here- does it really need to be power competitive? When we talk about compute per watt we are really talking about cost. What is the cost of something modern and power competitive compared to reusing a phone that was already purchased, in a setup that mostly idles?

Kind of interesting to think about, it's impossible to net $5b from this endeavour as you have to imagine it will cost between 1c and 99c in manpower/electricity/expenses per phone to do the extracting.

But the question is how much.