The first thing that comes to mind when selling your smart phone, is to delete all your personal data from the phone I case it gets into the wrong hands. But guess what? If you thought that by setting your Android phones to factory reset, you have deleted all your data, then you are sadly mistaken. The factory reset tool only deletes the data at the application layer. This means that if you are unfortunate to sell your phone to a technical geek, then it will be very easy for him to retrieve your personal data. There are data retrieving softwares that can easily retrieve photos, videos, SMS, location data and even Facebook chats from the phone. There are however a few options that you can try to save your data from being retrieved.
Under the Settings tab, go to Security on your Android phones and then turn on the Encrypt Phone option. Now you can delete your data. The data cannot be decrypted without a PIN or a password, which usually gets deleted in the factory reset. It becomes difficult to get access to the data. You can also use applications to delete the data.
- Secure Delete: this application deletes any file from your phone’s internal memory or SD card and is compatible with the Android 2.3+ versions.
- Secure Whip: this application is used after the factory reset to wipe all the free space to make your data unrecoverable.
- Android Shredder: this application provides multiple algorithms for data deletion.
Ensure that your data has been deleted to the extent that is unrecoverable. This could save you from a lot of hassle and will leave you in peace after selling your phone.
