Selling your old phone? - A warning...

[This Time Next Year]

I got a new phone recently, so I stuck my old android one on ebay and got a few quid more for it than the shop were going to pay me for it. (2.5x to be exact)

So, before I send it I factory reset it... and then my techie curiosity gets the better of me. I plug it into my pc to check its wiped, nothing on there, run recuva (see http://www.piriform.com) and choose a deep scan, and lo and behold it fins all my old data (4,728 files!). mp3s, jpgs, and pdfs etc.

So I recover a few of the files it found, and as a random selection, I find a picture of me as a smurf, a picture with two of my young nieces, a bike map of Portsmouth and most worryingly, one of my electricity bills complete with name address and account number.

My old phone is now having its free space splatted with ccleaner's drive wiper tool before it send it anywhere.

So, if you're disposing of a phone, or selling it to someone you don't know, or can't trust, make sure you clear it properly, and not just factory reset or remove the sim. (this applies to anything else with a hard drive too!)

For more details see: http://www.piriform.com/docs/ccleaner/u ... disk-space

[Pompski!]

Not just phones either. You can recover files from memory sticks and cameras too, even if the card appears to be black.

[HappyHour@TheBreweryOfLife]

You must always wipe a memory after you have marked files for deletion, otherwise your files just sit there waiting to be restored.

Many a false identity has been created this way.

[Earl Grey]

So, if you're disposing of a phone, or selling it to someone you don't know, or can't trust, make sure you clear it properly, and not just factory reset or remove the sim. (this applies to anything else with a hard drive too!)

For more details see: http://www.piriform.com/docs/ccleaner/u ... disk-space

Thanks for the advice, TTNY.
I just pray that if some bar steward did get my details off an extinct laptop/phone/camera they'd find me so mind-numbingly uninteresting they'd just move on to the next laptop/phone/camera to explore.

[formerly known as]

how about DNA left on my old analogue phone?

[Earl Grey]

how about DNA left on my old analogue phone?

Can you get useful DNA samples from ear-wax?

Now my laptop is probably covered with all kinds of bodily material you can extract DNA from...