Every year, thousands of consumers selling their old smartphone to monetize or to switch to a next-generation device. Well, a new study reveals that it is very easy access to personal and sensitive data contained on the devices you use .
Recently, AVAST Software has purchased 20 used smartphone in stores of 4 cities (New York, Paris, Barcelona and Berlin). The company therefore took a free recovery tool to determine what private information contained on a device can be effectively recovered.
On 20 used smartphones, a large number of personal data have been recovered , including more than 200 photos for adults, 1,200 personal photos, 149 photos of children, bills, more than 300 email and SMS,
and a video ‘very thorough’. Also, in two of the devices examined they were contained personal data, which has made it much easier to map the data to a specific person.
What’s even more worrying is that not all devices had been reset to factory data before being sold . In addition, also on devices which have apparently been reset they found sensitive information.
”Among smartphones reset to factory data, 50% still contained personal data because these performed an outdated version
of Android which used a non reliable reset function. Some owners have simply deleted your files from the device, without performing a reset. This means that the files have not been removed completely, but that was just deleted the reference
to the file. Other consumers have instead even forgot to delete their data or perform a factory reset.”
This study shows that modern smartphones contain very many, perhaps too many, information about their respective owners.
It is precisely for this reason that Apple does not want to accept the FBI’s request to create a special version of iOS with backdoor?
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