Used your new iPhone to take a few compromising snaps at that bucks party, did you? Better watch out!

The other day, hacker "NerveGas" (alias Jonathan Zdziarski) presented an O'Reilly webcast iPhone Forensics 101: Bypassing the iPhone Passcode which demonstrated steps that can be used by law enforcement to bypass the iPhone 3G's passcode lock by creating a custom firmware bundle.

Zdziarski is described as being a full-time research scientist and longtime mobile hacker who has played a key role in opening the iPhone's environment to third-party software development, and is hailed on many geek news sites for cracking this device and leading the effort to write the first open source applications. He has written books on iPhone development and forensics for O'Reilly.

As reported in Wired by Brian X. Chen, during the webcast Zdziarski explained how the iPhone keeps a snapshot image of your most recent action, so that it can carry out a shrinking effect when you switch back to the Home menu.

According to Chen, Zdziarski said it could take as little as 60 seconds to break the iPhone's security.

And "this is only one way forensics experts collect evidence. Other methods include taking data from the iPhone's keyboard cache, Safari cache, Google Maps lookups and so on. Experts and hackers can also recover deleted photos or e-mails from months ago."

To be fair to the iPhone, I guess that the same could be said about my old Nokia phone, or just about any mobile device.

Blimey, what's the world coming to? ... What with security monitors all over the place (in streets, buildings, trains, taxis), our travels trackable via our mobile phones, our money trail traceable via ATMs and in-store card readers, not to mention the plethora of trails lurking on our PCs. ... It goes on and on.

We don't have much privacy left at all, do we?