Do you want to sell your old smartphone with Androidom and think you can say goodbye to your data for good by simply doing a factory reset? In reality, it is not as simple as it seems and even if you restore your phone, its new owner has a chance to access your private data. This was the conclusion reached by the antivirus company Avast, which bought 20 different bazaar smartphones from the Internet and began digging into them with the help of various forensic software.
A Factory Reset was previously performed on all devices, i.e. restoring the phone to factory settings. Despite this, Avast experts were able to obtain more than 40 photos from phones, including more than 000 photos of families with children, 1 photos of women dressing or undressing, more than 500 selfies of men, 750 searches via Google Search , at least 250 emails and text messages, more than 1 contacts and email addresses, the identities of four previous phone owners and even one loan application.
However, it is still necessary to point out the fact that the experts worked on the data with the help of forensic software, which was designed to look for traces of deleted files on disks. As a result, it is rather an activity that the new owner of the phone will not perform, unless he is a member of the secret service or cooperates with the American agency NSA. The data was recovered on devices with different versions of the system Android, with Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean having a dominant position. Among other things, the devices included smartphones from Samsung, including Galaxy S2, Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4 to Galaxy Stratosphere. Finally, the company pointed out that its Avast Anti-Theft application can erase data from the phone really precisely and recommends doing so before you connect your phone to the Internet.
*Source: PhoneArena
