How to sell your phone without your data!

In the end of 2010 a study was done showing than more than 50% of second hand cellphone (smart and dumb) sold on Craigslist, eBay and other channels had personal data on them.

It is a general (but WRONG) belief that doing a full wipe or your phone using the internal “Factory Reset” is going to make your data unavailable for the future owner of your device. Tools like Recuva and plenty of others will allow any user with a minimum of knowledge to retrieve most of your precious data.

Why is that? Let’s me explain you quickly. When you “wipe” your device, you basically do the same as a quick format on your computer, you delete the file system. The file system is basically the way “data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device(s) which contain it“.

Basically, when you wipe your device, you don’t delete the files you just delete the “table of content” giving the appearance to the OS that the drive is empty while it is NOT.

Fortunately a lot of tools also allow you to protect you from that. Those tools will randomly write data on your data partitions, making information extremely or impossible to retrieve depending on the algorithm you use and also the time you have.

The more secure the algorithm is the longer it takes to wipe the drive but also the safer your data is!

I strongly invite you to check those tools, they will protect your private life and allow you to cell your smartphone without the fear to give your holidays pictures with it

1. Disk Wipe: Portable, no installation needed, uses several advanced shredding algorithms (Dod 5220-22.M, US Army, Peter Guttman) to securely wipe data, supports all popular Windows file systems, NTFS, Fat, Fat32.
2. Eraser: advanced security tool for Windows that allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. The patterns used for overwriting are based on Peter Gutmann’s paper Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory and are selected to effectively remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive
3. Freeraser: function on three levels:
4. a fast destruction (standard 1-round filling of random data)
5. a forced destruction (3 rounds of filling according to DoD 5220.22M standard)
6. an ultimate destruction (35 rounds of filling with data according to Guttman algorithm).

Let me know if you’re using any other tool and feel free to leave your comments.