You buy a new Android smartphone, and in some point of time, it goes obsolete. Even if it doesn’t go that obsolete, you get bored with it, and want to sell or exchange it. While having the sale or exchange, you may want to wipe all your data so that the one who is buying it can’t see them. You think that doing the factory reset deletes all the stuff from your Android smartphone, and you just do it, and give it away for sale or exchange.
Now, let’s come to the point. The traditional way you have been doing so long thinking to be safe, is not as safe as you have been expecting it to be. Latest research has shown that doing the factory reset doesn’t Delete all your data in Android smartphone or tablet. The research was done by Avast, a security company which is mostly popular for its Antivirus.
In the process of the research, they first bought 20 used phones from E-bay. All the phones they bought were already factory reset by the sellers, but from these phones, they managed to recover 40,000 photos (including 1,500 family photos with children and 250 nude selfies of someone’s “manhood”), 750 emails, 250 contacts with names and addresses and even files such as a loan application and a completed sexual harassment course. Predictably, some of the recovered photos were pornographic.
The recovery method, however is not the easy process, and is not a very hard process either. When wiping any storage device, you’re often not actually erasing the data itself. Rather, the software that manages the device’s content erases the index information for the file, marking those bits as ready to be overwritten with new data anytime. But the data is still there, and, with the right recovery tools, can still be accessed. Hence, if you want your private stuff not to be accessed after you sell of your phone, insert some data in it, and it will help you to some extent.
The factory reset method works well with iOS, because it has a special hardware encryption in which when the phone is reset, the encryption keys are overwritten and thus, makes the recovery very difficult. In android, the wipe method is done by the NAND Flash, which makes it difficult to completely evacuate the phone.
You still do not need to be hopeless whatsover. Even if factory reset doesn’t delete all your data on Android, there is a safer way for it. There is an option of encrypting the data in your Android, and you can do it by following the given steps:
1. Plug in your phone to charge.
2. Open the Settings Icon on your Android device
3. Select Security within the Settings list
4. Select Encrypt Phone.
5. When the process is complete, restore to factory settings as you usually would.
The result will now certainly make us alert about the reset and about the secrecy our private stuffs. Be careful next time when you think of selling or exchanging your Android smartphone!
