How much searching do they do on your phone after a suicide?

[dopaminedeath]

i'm throwing all my devices into the ocean before CTB

This is correct and can be done even when there is a password/passcode. They can brute-force in with special software.
Mobile device forensics involves the use of specialized tools and techniques to extract data from a mobile device, including both the device's memory and any external storage media, such as a SIM card or SD card. The extracted data can include text messages, call logs, contacts, photos, videos, and other types of digital evidence.

Mobile device forensics is often used in criminal investigations, as well as in civil and corporate cases, to uncover evidence related to cyber crimes, fraud, and other types of wrongdoing. It is also used to recover lost or deleted data, such as photos or text messages, for personal or business purposes.

Put a hammer to it. Or make it unreadable with a magnet or something like in movies. No need to harm the ocean

 

[cryptoinvestor]

I wouldn't care if I'm gone what they can get out at that point, I'll be gone.

i wouldn't want anyone knowing how promiscuous i was, i want them to remember me with dignity

 

[dtkdave87]

That's why I will still keep my burner till the end

 

[failure383]

Your best bet would be to transfer the files you, want to backup on an encrypted USB-stick and destroy your phone afterwards. The easiest and go-to method would be Veracrypt.

Go to this page: https://veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html. Then to "Downloads". Download Veracrypt for your operating system. For Windows just choose "EXE Installer". Install Veracrypt accordingly. After the installation, open it and choose to "Create a volume within a partition/drive.", then select the device you need. Perhaps this could sound more complicated than it is, but you should choose a filesystem and encryption/hashing algorithm, if you don't understand what that is, it's best to choose "FAT" for your filesystem, "AES" for your encryption and "SHA-512" as your hash algorithm. For the randomness, just move your mouse back and worth randomly inside the Veracrypt window. Then you can enter your password. The password is the most important part. Make it 20 characters long, with special symbols, letters and numbers. You can mount your USB-stick whenever you want, by choosing "Mount device", selecting your device and then entering your password. Do this to check if everything worked out.

Unfortunately this is probably one of the few ways you can actually be secure from Law enforcement, if they want to check your data AND they will if you ctb. If you have questions, just ask me in this thread or via DM, I'll answer when I see it, but I can't promise that I see it, since I'm not that active here.#

(In case anyone argues, that a Linux live system with encrypted LUKS-volume would be more secure, then that's true, but probably too complicated for simply having a secure USB-stick. Walking that extra mile is probably retatively futile for OP in this case)

Can you not just put a passcode on your phone? Or are police able to get through that? I thought for Apple phones they couldn't

They are all backdoored, except for maybe some custom Android ROMs, that offer Full-Disk-Encryption, but I they're also insecure. There is no good security measure you can take to make it secure, more or less.

 

[Fleki]

God, yeah, this is something I am so fucking paranoid about. No one who loved me needs to know I was a little fucking weirdo lol. Having to make sure everything's good to go before I CTB has honestly kept me from up and doing it for a lonnnnng time.

For a phone, the destruction route everyone else suggested seems the most thorough. If you're really worried about people seeing your personal stuff I'd also suggest to make note of other things you might have. Journals, personal computers, junk like that. Anything you wouldn't want someone else holding onto once you're through. I do not actually have an answer to your question itself (and it imagine it heavily hinges on where you live), but if I were in your shoes I'd just take as many measures as I can and hope for the best.

 

[Not A Fan]

When someone close to me passed from suicide (they were still a teenager when it happened) I was told briefly that the police had gone through all of their devices and searched through recently deleted files,messages,photos etc.

This can be case specific since they were young and this was in the UK however most places carry out the same precautions

This is an excellent point.

If the person who died is a teenager, cops and parents are going to search through everything, thoroughly.

Consider the only reason SN is being banned is because kids took it.. it's always "think of the children." I doubt they'd care as much if it was only used by adults. So a teen who dies from SN, the cops will try to track down where they got it, who they were in contact with, etc. If you are like me, in your late 30s with multiple drug convictions, and no position in the community, they are more likely to just say "good riddance" and call it day.

Edit: This is from a west coast US perspective. Other jurisdictions may vary.

 

[cryptoinvestor]

If the person who died is a teenager, cops and parents are going to search through everything, thoroughly.

my mum would invade and read my diary, even as an adult. pretty sure if i passed, she would hire someone to crack my devices for the fun of it, if the police won't do it

 

[Not A Fan]

my mum would invade and read my diary, even as an adult. pretty sure if i passed, she would hire someone to crack my devices for the fun of it, if the police won't do it

This is an example of one of the devices that cops use to crack iPhones; they've had them for years now, but not surprisingly, it's not something we ever hear about.

"In 2019, Cellebrite announced a new version of the UFED, called the UFED Premium. The company claimed that it can unlock iOS devices including those running iOS 12.3 and Android phones such as the Galaxy S9.[20]"

Cellebrite - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[EsotericByDesign]

As others have pointed out, simply erasing or doing a factory reset often isn't enough if there's enough determination to access information. If you want to be certain about making sure it can't be accessed, destroying it in some fashion is the only sure way to do this. Taking a drill to the motherboard, and more importantly the flash chip, will take care of the issue. Kill the hard drive too. Can't access the information if the thing containing the information is destroyed. It's the same for laptops, tablets, PCs, etc. Then dispose of the hardware. Please don't throw it in the ocean/river/whatever though.

Does this look suspicious? Probably. Does that matter? In the end, probably not.

There is still the issue of history from ISP or Google or whatever, but not much you can really do about that in this day and age. I set up analytics tracking in my day job and people would reel in disgust if they knew how much was being tracked. It makes me feel disgusting just doing it :/

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

This is an excellent point.

If the person who died is a teenager, cops and parents are going to search through everything, thoroughly.

Consider the only reason SN is being banned is because kids took it.. it's always "think of the children." I doubt they'd care as much if it was only used by adults. So a teen who dies from SN, the cops will try to track down where they got it, who they were in contact with, etc. If you are like me, in your late 30s with multiple drug convictions, and no position in the community, they are more likely to just say "good riddance" and call it day.

Edit: This is from a west coast US perspective. Other jurisdictions may vary.

In the UK if the death is a classed as a suicide there will be an investigation and if the method is unconventional, or if the passing occured in a place where the person should have been watched over (like a hospital or prison) there will be an investigation, an inquest, and a coroner's report on the subject, with the intention of preventing further deaths.

You can read them online as they are often publically accessible. Some members of this site had reports written about them posthumously, even ones who were very adamant about being against the sort of campaigning that takes place in the coroner's reports. Usually they are looking to find someone to pin blame on, like medical staff or mental health services, and identify actions (or inaction) that may have contributed to a suicide. For example, if someone is under a community mental health team and not being checked up on, then they go on to CTB, it's highly likely that situation will be looked into and every detail of that person's life dug up.

It happens for adults often, if the circumstances fit that profile. Recently I also read about a lawsuit in Japan or South Korea where a young employee in her early 20s ctb due to grueling working conditions. It was well documented that she was forced to work over 100 hours of overtime a month and the company was killing her.

After she died there was an investigation and many of the company executives and spindoctors avoided taking accountability, so they slung the woman's name through the mud for awhile and accused her of being mentally weak, lazy, and having boyfriend problems. But in the end they ended up facing punishment anyway because there was far too much evidence in the woman's social media and phone to prove that the company had been overworking her and ruining her health.

So I think in many places they will end up prying a lot and trying to discern a motive. In the US I am not so sure. It's something that bothers me but I know there's not much I can do to retain privacy in death.

 

[Kasumi]

You should assume that they can get into all ur devices, a phone is the harder part here but as it was mentioned they have ways or backdoors to bypass ur lockscreen.

When you delete data of any device, it's still possible to restore it, because "deleting" just means marking the space as "free to be used again", the files will actually stay there.
But they can't find everything.
If you deleted a file a year ago, chances are high it got overwritten a few times by other data by now and is completely unrecoverable.
There is also software / apps that does exactly that, securely delete stuff by overwriting it several times with random garbage.
So definitely do that in addition to a factory reset.

I'd be more worried about the data that isn't on your devices, e.g. data backed up to the cloud, cause u don't really have a guarantee that the cloud provider will actually remove the data when u delete it.
So I'd always make sure ur sensitive data, private notes, conversations, media isn't backed up in the cloud, back it up locally.
Also while you most likely can't delete all ur messaging data, at laest delete your social media accounts, sign out everywhere, delete the apps and browsers securely.
If they don't know which accounts u used they can't knock on let's say metas doors to ask them to hand over ur data.

 

[Cakeisalie]

Absolutely nothing, unless they are very, very good divers, all the data transfomed into thousands of fragments scattered around the sea...

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

Deleting everything is part of my CTB plans. When it comes to loved ones being able to dig through your computer, the key is to leave enough info intact that they won't feel compelled to dig through and find anything worse like your activity on this site or the source of your method. If they feel satisfied with the information they got then the police likely won't need to be involved at all. The key is to start by planting fake leads and false information that seems more practical than whatever you're actually hiding.