Security → Used Phones Are Full of Previous Owners146; Data

»www.theatlantic.com/tech ··· /470787/

How many of you are in this same category, thinking you're phone is clean when it isn't?

"Researchers bought 20 used smartphones in four cities, and recovered thousands of photos, texts, and emails.

The ongoing high-profile legal fight between Apple and the government might give the impression that modern smartphones have evolved into impenetrable, encrypted fortresses. After all, even the FBI, with all its tools and resources, can’t hack its way into a 3-year-old iPhone.

Outfitted with the latest security technology, late-model iPhones and Androids are indeed very effective at hiding information. But they make up only a small subset of the billions of smartphones in the world. Much of the rest of the smartphone market is outdated, buggy, and downright leaky."

Yeah, not surprised there. They went to pawn shops...d'oh...

quote:

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But more often than not, the presence of easily recoverable data wasn’t the phone’s fault—it was the owner’s. Twelve of the 20 phones examined were not, in fact, factory reset.

On some, owners tried to delete their files manually. In those cases, researchers were often able to dig up the deleted files with free data-recovery tools available online. Other owners hadn’t even tried to delete files or perform a factory reset before selling their devices—and two phones were even still signed into old Gmail accounts.

It may not come as a surprise that the pawn-shop owners made less-than-accurate claims about the smartphones they were reselling. In fact, it could be that the smartphone owners that didn’t reset their phones to factory settings were not planning to sell their phones: Pawn shops often end up with lost and stolen electronics.

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My phone that I'd bought used most certainly had been reset to OEM before I'd bought it.

Same can be said for computers.
I've bought used or scavenged many that had everything from their previous owners on them still.

Include car calling systems, too. Our used Lexus had the previous owner's iPhone contacts in the phonebook. His music subscriptions, too.
We deleted both.