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This is a true story.

Yesterday my phone crashed, and it wouldn’t reboot. Actually it would do nothing but reboot, over and over, with a seemingly different error message every time. I tried all of the tricks available to a technically handy person, and nothing worked—I couldn’t get it out of the crash-reboot cycle.

So I need to send my phone in for service. The problem is: the phone is full of my data, and I don’t want a random service guy to get his hands on that data. Nor do I want a random service guy to be able to resume whatever logged-in sessions I had on apps and sites when the phone started crashing.

What I want is to have the data on my phone encrypted. Strongly encrypted. Without a backdoor, because the service guy has no need to see my data and no right to get it. I would have wiped the phone’s memory before sending it in for service, but that would have required the phone to stay functional long enough to wipe itself.

What I don’t want is for the service guy to have access to a “secure golden key” that gives him access to my data.