iPhone hacking expert Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Forensics reported recently about his discovery that the iPhone actually stores a screenshot every time you press the Home button. These screenshots are used to create the zooming effect while returning to your Home screen and may seem innocent enough, but they can be retrieved by prying eyes should your device fall in to the wrong hands.

Now Zdziarski has published a very simple workaround to halt the creation and storage of these images. The workaround requires a jailbroken iPhone or iPhone 3G because you will need to make some small changes to the file system.

…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…

To accomplish this workaround you simply have to execute the following commands on your jailbroken unit via SSH or a Native Terminal App:

# rm -rf /var/mobile/Library/Caches/Snapshots
# ln -s /dev/null /var/mobile/Library/Caches/Snapshots

To revert back to your default factory settings, erase the newly created symlink with the following command and the iPhone will recreate the proper files:

#rm /var/mobile/Library/Caches/Snapshots