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Not bad. If I could make a feature request it would be something like, After 3 days of being idle:

- [ ] Reboot

- [ ] Power Off

- [X] WIPE triple opt-in

Maybe there is a custom phone OS for this that makes the phone act more ephemeral and network boot off my self hosted iPXE/immich server? A dumb smart phone so to speak. An ephemeral diskless phone.

3 comments

The WIPE is doable with a custom "management app", which has the permission to wipe the phone. Maybe such a thing already exists.

A long long time ago, adding Gmail to your phone via the Exchange protocol over m.google.com gives Google the ability to wipe your phone remotely, including iPhones as well. No management profile needed.

I've been fantasizing about building an iPXE netbooting phone for a while now, glad to see that I'm not the only one. Mine was sparked by seeing some journalists in my country getting arrested recently.

I think it should be doable _technically_, but I think getting the mobile radios working before the OS boots would be challenging.

If the phone can boot off a thumb-drive then people could have a keychain thumb-drive that serves the sole purpose of a minimal OS that can iPXE, boot the real OS and pull down the users contacts, apps, etc... maybe?

Without a verified boot chain, security would be greatly compromised.

Like I could just grab your thumb drive, and put a new system on there that looks the same, and steals your password.

A wipe seems extreme. An unexpected trip to the hospital could leave someone with a wiped phone when they come to.

If that’s something you are worried about, don’t choose that option.

Is there a person on this planet where an unexpected hospital visit could not happen?

I think a wipe is not necessarily that much of an issue.

Some people lose or get their phone broken and start from a blank one on a regular basis.

In my case the only things that matter to me are synchronised through syncthing and radicale (a carddav/caldav server).

Wrong question. It's not about the chance of having a wipe. But if the having the wipe is worth happening on some false positives.

Someone may want that behavior if they were intentionally injured and kept from their phone for 3 days. The perpetrators will eventually get past the hospital security. Contents should be backed up in a safe place either way, possibly in a place that someone that cares about them may access it.