The mode of resetting the smartphone to the factory state is not a guarantee of deleting personal information

When selling your phone to someone, we usually use the tool to restore the device to its factory condition. Such a regular tool is in almost any smartphone, but now it is about devices on the Android OS.

In principle, nothing complicated - erased all the information, and the phone can be sold. But is the information really deleted. The other day, AVAST employees had the idea to check whether users' personal information is really deleted permanently. To check this on eBay, 20 used smartphones were bought from various users.
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Then the staff used some "widespread software tools to recover deleted files." It turned out that the restoration of the state of the phone to the factory state, i.e. "Reset" does not guarantee the complete destruction of personal data.

It was possible to recover a lot of information:

• More than 40,000 previously erased photos;
• More than 1500 family photos of kids;
• About 750 photos of girls and women in varying degrees of uh dressed;
• About 250 selfies in the style of "nude";
• Over 1000 Google search queries;
• More than 750 messages, including email and SMS;
• Over 250 contacts and email addresses;
• Four address cards of previous owners with all the data;
• Fully completed loan application.

In general, a lot of interesting things were restored, and after all, all these data were supposed to be permanently deleted.

There is one point - in the article about their “experience” posted on the AVAST blog, the authors posted a recommendation on using their own application for reliable deletion of data that wipes user files “on top”, excluding the possibility of their recovery. Those. The article is clearly not experience for the sake of experience, but experience for the sake of demonstrating the capabilities of your application to securely wipe user files from mobile devices.

Nevertheless, it is worth checking your own phones with a “reset” - after all, if this is the case, as described in the article, maybe Google should create a more reliable reset tool?

Of course, in the market for used devices is full of devices from which you can restore previously erased information. This flash drives and hard drives and everything else. But the phone is a more personal device than the same flash drive, and many interesting things relating to the identity of the previous owner can be stored in the memory of a smartphone.

So all this should be borne in mind, before selling your phone, what do you think?

Via theverge