As prevously reported, everytime you tap press the home button to close an application, your iPhone takes a screenshot of the screen your on in order to provide the zoom out effect of the application closing.
Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Forensics
, and iPhone Open Application Development found a way to prevent your iPhone from saving those screenshots:
I found that the screenshots themselves actually get written to /var/mobile/Library/Caches/Snapshots. If you delete this folder and symlink it to /dev/null, the screenshots don’t get written to disk. The side effect to this is that when resuming an application, you’ll get the default screen in the zoom-in effect. Once the application resumes, however, you’ll have your application screen back. For example, your mail application will always zoom to the front as if you had an empty inbox, but will quickly correct itself once the application resumes. On a jailbroken iPhone, you can disable these screenshots with the following commands:
- # rm -rf /var/mobile/Library/Caches/Snapshots
- # ln -s /dev/null /var/mobile/Library/Caches/Snapshots
“To return to the default behavior, just delete the symlink and the directory will get recreated. Mind you, this has no effect on the many other pieces of data stored on the iPhone, and therefore your iPhone will always be at risk for leaking private data, especially to seasoned forensic examiners. Use at your own risk.
Credit Photo: Gizmodo