Thinking of selling your Android phone?, chances are your text messages, emails, pictures and Facebook key are still in there, even if you wiped its memory clean or used Factory reset.
Computer researchers at the University of Cambridge in a recent study now shows that "factory reset", at least on Android devices doesn't actually erase everything.
The study show that sometimes, it doesn't even get close to wiping anything off the memory.
Researchers performed tests on 21 phones made by Google, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung. In all the tests, they were able to recover text messages, Google account credentials and conversations on messaging apps and also a few emails remained on the device more than 50% of the time.
Among these were, the special app "tokens" that lets you access your Facebook and other social media accounts remained on the device. These devices don't properly wipe the special part of your phone that stores all your pictures and videos up to 80% of the time.
The devices tested include the HTC One, HTC Sensation XE, Motorola Razr I, Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung Galaxy S2, Samsung Galaxy S Plus and many others. It was found that the Google Nexus 4 performed the best, yet it still had issues.
Researchers our sources that part of the blame lies with Google, which makes the Android software that runs all these phones. Some of the phone makers are also at fault, because of bad design and terribly slow upgrades and software updates.
Fortunately, Google does offer an option to protect your Google-related stuff (such as Gmail, Drive documents and maps). You can open Gmail, head to the Google dashboard and "revoke" that device's access to your Google account.
- Manually deleting every photo, message and app doesn't actually work. Hitting "delete" doesn't really destroy that file on your phone, because flash memory -- the type these phones use -- is notoriously difficult to erase, Our sources say.
- Another method is to encrypt everything on your phone with a passcode; but then how will you be able to sell your phone?
If you're determined to sell your old phone, there's no way to be sure your data is completely gone.
"This can be desperately complicated," one of the researchers on the study say, but cyber security expert in Norway had this different but brutal solution to offer "Don't hand off your old phone. Smash it," he advised.
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