[FEATURE PROPOSAL] Emergency Hard Reset

Hi everybody !

I thought about an emergency feature that would delete automaticly all the data (and eventually re-write them for more efficiency) when you enter your preset hard reset password.

I know this feature is clearly not a priority but in few years it could be on the top of the to do list so I’m suggesting it. It would definitely interested some “important” people (and even normal people), and be a main line feature.

For instance, your lockscreen password is “BestPasswordEver”, and your hard reset password (that you’ve chosen) is “MyDataIsMyData”. If somebody’s forcing you to tell your password but you know you have sensitive informations on your phone, you just have to give him the secret hard reset password “MyDataIsMyData” and when he will enter it, the phone will immediatly start the factory reset.

If we push the concept even further, it could show a fake session, in which we would have put fake important documents, apps, contacts, photos, etc so that the bad guy doesn’t know all the real data are being wiped in the background.

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Hi Anonyme,

sounds like a helpful feature.
Please make featurerequests on gitlab, since that is the place where they are gathered and they might get overelooked here on the forum.

Here is a short tutorial on how to do that:
https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/wiki/en/wikis/issues

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This is an awesome idea!

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Is there any plan to implement this?

Interesting feature. A real life safety-net. Let get some more user suggestions on this and then decide.

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Hi, I have even another idea! I would have an suggestion to have a normal user password (similar to root) and have a secondary password (similiar to another user, very limited) so that if someone demands your password who doesnot have any power over you (a bully says, ‘give me your phone’, ‘give me your password’) you can give him the secondary password, everything looks legit to him, but it’s a fake screen.
This is different from the other feature because the other one immediately performs a hard reset. However, the bully doesn’t know how to perform extensive testing (as would a bad government at a checkpoint, a highly trained thief, etc), so you could just let him think he knows your password, but he actually doesn’t!

In both case it shows a fake session :slight_smile: But yes settings would look like this :

When the emergency password is entered :

  • Proceed to the hard reset in background (yes/no)
  • Show the fake session (yes/no)
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