David Strom’s Web Informant

New and improved with just a hint of lemon

Read this before you sell your cell phone

Posted by strom on September 1, 2006

The AP reports that people who buy used cell phones have a bonanza of data that is stored on the phones by their previous owners. A security company (who coincidentally sells data recovery software for phones) bought a bunch of phones on eBay and found a mountain of erased emails and text messages, some juicy and some racy. The trouble is that the erasures don’t get rid of things completely.

Here’s the article. Before you sell your cell, make sure everything is really outta there. For example, on a Treo it isn’t enough to poke that reset hole in the back of the phone: you have a four-fingered salute to really reset and zero-out everything.

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>