Wiping your old phone does not protect your privacy

Do you really think wiping your old phone completely removes your data from the mobile? Well, you need to think again on this. According to the recent report from Avast, out of 20 different phones they bought online they were able to retrieve around 50,000 photos, identity of old owners, contacts along with loan applications and much more. Now this sound quite surprising and alarming at the same time.

So, now answer this question again. Do you really think wiping your old phone completely removes your data from the mobile? Well, now we know your answer. Interesting point here is that all the smartphones were wiped using the phone’s built in “phone reset” option but still Avast was able to retrieve the information. Avast mentions in its reports that using the system wipe option does not secure your privacy and the data stored in the mobile phone. People can still retrieve it using different methods.

This issue is not only with the Android platform but it is with all mobile platforms whether it is IOS, Windows or Symbian. Every mobile operating system has this glitch which can be used to retrieve vital information from your old mobile phone.

Basically when you use system wipe options it remove the pointers pointing at the data only thus allowing you to over write the already saved data. So, until the space is not completely written with the new data , it is fairly possible to fetch the old data.

Solution:

Now you would be looking for a solution. Well, if we talk about software companies just like  Avast they will suggest you to use new softwares which have the potential to remove the data completely from the system but let’s not get into it. You can do it in a more simple and easy way without spending money in buying the softwares.

Whenever you are going to wipe your mobile phone make sure you encrypt the data. This will de index your data and will make it difficult to point at it again. Even if someone is able to get the data, your data will still be encrypted and it will not be easy to decrypt.

So next time make sure to encrypt and wipe your data before selling your old phone. We hope you learnt something important so make sure to pass it on to others.