One mild voice, mildly offering mild disagreement with the notion, often expressed online, that Libby would have been too unsophisticated to know how to save her photos and personal information, when she reset her phone.
My wife and I are old enough to have grandchildren in high school; I know for a fact that my wife is too naive technologically to do anything *technical* to save her phone contents--saving photos and her contacts list via USB or BT. (I'm not.) But when she got a new phone recently, our carrier prompted her to backup all her personal stuff on the web and then ported it to the new phone when she activated it. She did that without any trouble. And I feel certain that Libby was technologically more advanced at 13 than my wife is now.
My own feeling is that Libby certainly would have known if she was going to lose personal content and data on her phone in a reset, and she certainly would have been able to back it up if she had wanted to. I believe that pretty firmly--I'm not saying she DID, but I think it's simply not true to say she wouldn't have known to and wouldn't have been able to do it. Those selfies and texts are important to kids, and neither of the girls was dumb.
A friend from work, a few years ago, told me proudly that she had "locked down" her home internet and wifi to protect her mid-teens boy. She was surprised a few months later to learn that he'd bypassed all that very easily and was streaming *advertiser censored* at home. Kids today aren't dumb, and they are not naive about technology IMO.
Maybe you say, "Oh, a girl in rural Indiana wouldn't have known how to do that," but I will argue very seriously that it's vastly more likely that a young teen could do it than her mother could have done it. Kids have more time to play with software, more time to learn about options and capabilities, more time to try things, and more curiosity about what they can do with their devices. Disagree if you like, no hard feelings, but I'd bet my watch and my dog on the deal.
One other little tiny mild disagreement: 2017 being "the wild west early days (of the internet)"--highly bogus IMO. At work we were using the 'net in the late 1980s for several things, long, long before the worldwide web showed up. The AOL'ers started showing up in numbers in the early 1990s, and graphic interfaces started taking over--initially proprietary ones but then the web arrived, and soon we ALL were getting photos from our grandmothers, of cats who wanted cheeseburgers. Maybe some individuals didn't know about the web in 2017 but I bet they were older people, not young folks. The young folks in 2017 were probably complaining about being stuck on slow DSL.
That's my opinion on both matters. No hard feelings if you disagree. I firmly believe, though, that Libby would have known to find out before a reset if she were going to lose photos, and she would have known at least to find out how to save what she wanted saved.