This is interesting! With all the talk about that security flaw of double tapping the home button to bypass the iPhone's passcode a few other issues have been brought up as well. For instance, the phone takes a screenshot of everything you do! Each time you hit the home button, change websites in Safari, switch to landscape mode, etc, it takes a capture.
The iPhone does this in order to perform the nifty transitions it's known for. Zooming, flipping and other maneuvers are also made possible by this and while it's supposed to delete the screenshots, they don't actually go all the way away.
It only quick-deletes the items and doesn't overwrite them. This makes it so anyone that can hack into your phone's firmware can see exactly what you've been up to. This is rather serious but probably won't be a widespread threat. After all, if your phone is lost or stolen, the person that took it or found it would have to know how to hack it. Hopefully a remedy for this will be included in future fixes, though.
[via CrunchGear]
Its not a security flaw. Do you want the iPhone to overwrite each delete that it does on the unit? Think of the extra battery drain and the extra work on the flash RAM.
On a ‘closed’ system this isn’t an issue. Its not like joe blog can pick up your phone and see were you have been via these screen shots. These is more risk from the browser history, URL history, text messages and emails all left ‘open’ for anyone to pickup and view (assuming no pin code).
I wonder if this specific cache of screenshots is eveuntually overwritten when u restart your iPhone… I’m assuming no.” It would seem like a fairly easy task for a dev to make a program downloadable from cydia or something that would completely delete the folder contents.