Lots of people either donate or sell their used smartphones or tablets as an alternative to just throwing them out. It is always important to wipe the data from the device before you do get rid of it. The problem is that you may think that you erased your data but it is still there and with the right tools can be recovered. Yesterday, security software maker AVAST put out a detailing how they purchased 20 used Android phones and used some data recovery software to obtain photos, web searches, emails, texts and contact information from the phones. The thing is that the people selling the phones probably thought they removed the data by performing a factory reset or using the delete all functions in their phone.

Now the purpose of the press release was to try and get people to purchase into their avast! Anti-Theft app but there is another solution to this problem. The issue actually has to do with how the data is stored and wiped from the memory of the phone. You see, with current Apple iPhones and iOS, all the data is hardware encrypted on the device with a decoder key stored on the phone. When you use the Erase All Content and Settings on the iPhone, the decryption key is erased effectively making the data unreadable. With Android, the data is not encoded by default and the wipe data does not physically remove the files just some of the index entries for them.

Now the Factory Reset feature on Android phones may erase the data enough but since each manufacturer can implement a different method, one cannot be certain that it does. To ensure that the data is as unreadable as it can be, it is best to first use the security settings in the phone to setup Encryption. This will require an additional password and time to then encrypt all the data. Once that is done, using the Factory Reset should leave the data in a reasonable unreadable state. Most often Encryption will be enabled under the Security portion of the device settings but it can vary with the version of Android and the device. If you cannot find the settings, check with the manufacturer of the phone on how to enable it.