When you buy a new mobile, what do you do with the old? Simple: swipe the SIM card; wipe the memory to delete numbers, texts, e-mails and photos; then flog the phone on eBay or give it to a friend.
But giving your phone amnesia is not as simple as you may think. Trust Digital, a US security company, bought ten PDAs and smartphones on eBay to determine what it could recover, using cheap, downloadable software. It found details of business contracts and sales information, personal financial records, password lists and even saucy extramarital texts. Nine of the phones contained recoverable information; the tenth had never been used.
Today’s phones are designed to retain data in the hands of even the most foolhardy user. More full-featured smartphones, including BlackBerries, Treos and their ilk, also contain large amounts of data nearly impossible to erase. To execute the “hard wipe” — which you must to obliterate a phone’s memory and which is often a bewildering combination of simultaneous button-pushes — consult the manual or contact customer support. If you don’t, you may be giving away something far more valuable than an old phone.