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Selling Your Phone? Why Deleting Your Smartphone Data is Not Enough

Janice Cook
October 12, 2017

Planning to sell your old phone? Wiping your smartphone data in the right way is perhaps necessarily crucial to lessen the threat of your private or business details falling into the wrong hands.

Many of us are unaware of the fact that the deleted data on the phone can be quickly recovered by utilizing the right tools. One can’t rely on conventional methods of cleaning the phone before selling it to another person.

Here we’ll be emphasizing on efficient ways to permanently delete the data on your phone without leaving any chance of data recovery.

Essential things before starting the procedure:

  • Don’t forget to backup your data and contacts.

  • Remove any external storage and SIM card.

  • Log out of different accounts like social media and email.

  • Make sure to copy the serial number of your device.

For Android Devices

For Android users out there, here’s a simple procedure that doesn’t squander your precious time and efforts for wiping your phone. A quick factory reset is all you need! However, this procedure cleans the phone on the application level, and you need to keep in mind that SMS and chat can be recovered by some special tools.

Don’t panic! Here’s an effective solution to this dilemma, which demands just a little more patience. Well, you need to encrypt the data on your phone before you can reset your device to the factory settings.

Encrypted data on your phone will demand a password each time someone tries to access the deleted data through a third-party tool for decryption. Just go to your phone’s Settings, then Security, followed by Encrypt Phone. This procedure takes a couple of minutes, so it is mandatory you keep ample of patience.

Once the data is encrypted, you can now reset the phone to the factory settings.

For iOS Devices

Now coming to the Apple devices, here’s the perfect way to avoid a privacy breach while you thought you have efficiently performed data destruction.

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