School districts in the Minneapolis and Anoka areas are considering purchasing software from Tenorshare.com that would restore lost, deleted, or damaged photos, texts, etc from an ios or Android device. While it is being marketed as a ‘restore’ mechanism whereby a school could restore iPad data from a school-owned device if the device is damaged, it is essentially the same type of software used by the FBI and government investigators for searching hard drives for evidence.
Very old messages and photos re-appeared when this restore software was used on iPhones, and it is available for Android devices as well. This means, as we attorneys have long suspected, that all digital activity becomes an imbedded footprint and is never truly “deleted”. Now this deleted information is available for recovery at a relatively low price.
As a family law attorney, I know that this sort of information can be very useful, and I know of cases where one parent has ‘restored’ another parent’s iPhone to find texts that are compromising. Those texts were then used against the compromised parent in a hearing to establish custody and parenting time. I mention this to my clients now.
