[brianwawok]

How come this is worth talking about?

I am a real small dude that runs a real small SaaS app for a living, but I won't fix 1-2 customer requests a week. I don't do it for fun, and I know they are really important to the user that asked for them. But at some point you have to have vision for the direction of a product, and build features for that product that get you in that direction.

Some PM at Google decided that a panic PIN was not worth coding. I am guessing they say all the bad cases of it (my toddler typed 1234 and my phone bricked), and decided they would outweigh the good features. It seems a reasonable decision?

Does apple have a panic PIN? If so, I am not aware of it...

[m463]

If you hold power + volume up on an iPhone for a couple seconds it disables biometric unlock. It flushes the unlock keys and only your pin will unlock the phone.

In other words power + volume up means the key to unlock your phone is in your head, not at the end of your finger or your face.

Apple does not have a panic wipe pin.

Personally I think a wipe pin is reasonable, just be VERY sure you don't type the wrong pin in by mistake.

Also, I wonder... would it even work? How long would it take to wipe 64gb or 128gb of flash? securely?

[geofft]

> In other words power + volume up means the key to unlock your phone is in your head, not at the end of your finger or your face.

That's not relevant to the specific request that was linked here (and that's why I think Google was right to close it, this is for one very specific use case and one very specific mechanism of solving it that may or may not actually work):

"In my country (Russia, if you interested) policy try to force political activist unlock their smartphones for collect more evidence. They use tortures and threats of tortures for this. If you you can`t unlock because it wiped they don`t have motivation to use tortures."

That is, the phone already doesn't have biometric auth, and the police will (allegedly) happily torture you until you reveal the unlock PIN.

[m463]

> That's not relevant to the specific request that was linked here

Sort of accurate. The "in your head" part is mostly relevant to the United States 5th amendment, where you cannot be compelled by the court to reveal your pin.

So if you live in the United States, they are similar in practical if not technical terms.

If you live in Russia? You're going to need google to fix that.

[tialaramex]

Don't wipe 128GB of flash.

If you care about this data then you would encrypt it at rest. Having encrypted it at rest there's a key, let's say it's a 256-bit AES key. So now when you throw away the 256-bit AES key the rest of the data is garbage, exactly as worthwhile as if you'd wiped it, but instantly.

A factory restore might take quite a lot longer, but as soon as that key is forgotten the data is gone.

[pizza234]

> Personally I think a wipe pin is reasonable, just be VERY sure you don't type the wrong pin in by mistake.

In the thread they mention that this would be a user-selectable option, so this case is covered. The audience would also be people with very special safety needs (whether truly activists or other professions), who certainly don't hand their phone to kids.

[jhart99]

Same thing can be set up at least with Pixel phones. If you reboot the phone it requires the PIN to unlock and finger prints or voice or face won't do it.

[thanksforfish]

Note that wipe and brick mean different things.

[mattmanser]

You get what he means though? Chances of people getting their phone wiped by accident is far higher than the extremely niche case of building some complex UI for an emergency wipe.