What do you know about your old Smartphone?

Well it knows a lot about you and isn't shy about sharing it.  These days just about everyone has some form of a smartphone, and we use it to take pictures at graduations, check our bank accounts, send and receive business emails, write business proposals, and manage our hectic schedules.   That is just a few things we do on our smartphones, but what do you do with that phone when you get a new one?  Trade it in?  Sell it on eBay or Craigslist?  Give it to the spouse or kids?  Put it in the church yard sale?  Donate it to charity?  All are possible options but did you think about the information that is on the phone?

With older non-smartphones we could just pull the sim card and the data went with it, well not anymore.  Smartphones like a computer stores the data on the phone and even if you do a factory reset on the phone the data is still there, even if the apps are not.  This is true for all smartphones be it Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows, etc.  Your personal and business data, including passwords, credit card numbers, bank account information, those pictures you never wanted anyone to ever see, emails, and contacts are all there and accessible. With identity theft being one of the biggest money makers for thieves today, a used smartphone is a potential gold mine of information. I wanted to see for myself, on an older Android tablet that I no longer use and was thinking of selling, what data would be there after a factory reset?

I know you say a tablet is not a phone, but an Android tablet uses the same software as a Android phone so it is a perfect test subject. After the factory reset the tablet booted up and looked just as it did when I took it out of the box the first day.  Only using the file manager installed on the tablet and no special software, I was able to find one picture I took testing the camera at my desk, the books I had downloaded for the Nook, my email accounts and contacts, and various other forms of data.  Boy I am glad I didn't sell it!  With specialized software, there would have been even more data to retrieve I am sure, as I did use the tablet to manage my personal finances from time to time.

So what should you do with an old phone?  Some places buy them and claim to wipe out the data using special software, but in researching this article I found stories of phones bought loaded with the former owners’ data still on it.  EBay does offer instructions for users selling a smartphone and specific instructions for iPhone's to make the phones safe for resale. The only perfect solution to protecting the data on the phones is to destroy the phone.  McAfee security experts recommend this method to assure that your information is safe.  So have some fun and take out some of the frustrations you have with these smartphones and take a hammer to it.  You may just find a new annual stress reduction ritual.