Skip to content

How to Permanently Delete Your Private Files When You Sell your Android

Many of you reading this article have the urge of trying every other new smartphone which has been launched in the market. Now you may end up buying that smartphone or you will sell your last smartphone, add few more bucks to it and then buy the new one. Has this ever occurred to you that the smartphone which you are about to sell might reveal all the important and personal information to someone else?

image

Can you get Rid of your Data by Deleting it?

Obviously you must have taken care of that problem by restoring your device which in turn would have removed all that data available over the internal memory of your smartphone. Are you sure that’s enough for your smartphone? To add your knowledge let me tell you that Avast tried to recover data from 20 smartphones which were sold by the users. They managed to recover 40,000 photos, 250 compromising selfies of men, identities of the sellers, more than 100 Google Searches and more than 750 emails and Messages.

This would have come as a shock to you but then it’s a reality, there many application out there which can be used to recover the deleted files from the internal memory of a smartphone. So, what is the remedy to this problem, how can you take care of this?

Try not to sell you external MicroSD card along with the smartphone because internal memory can be taken care of to some extent but MicroSD card can be taken out of the smartphone and more adverse Windows Based applications can be used to recover the data from external memory.


Why Your Data Get’s recovered even after you Delete it?

When ever you delete a file, space is freed up as far as operating system is concerned, but the data remains in the Nand Flash storage. Nothing much changes to your Nand Flash storage or for eMMC controller. Your OS just over-writes the Nand Flash cells once you load more data. Thus if you restore your device, load it completely with unimportant media files and re-restore it, you can easily get rid of your files permanently. That sounds like too much hardwork? You can also follow the following approach.

How to Permanently Delete Your Data by Encrypting It

In your smartphone, there is an option named ‘Encrypt’ available under the Security option. You should use that option to encrypt all the data and then restore your device. So, that even if a software manages to retrieve from your internal memory, it will be completely encrypted and thus he will have to decrypt it to look for into it (which is really tough and not doable to a huge extent).

Under Settings, there is an option named ‘Security’.

image

You can see an option named ‘Encrypt Phone’. Tap it.

image

You will see this screen. Follow these instructions and keep your phone connected with a charger.

image

After tapping, this you will be taken to the final screen after which the encryption process will start. Please be aware of the risks before doing it.

image

It will be great if you could restore it and then load it with some bogus data like lots of music and movies, just to fill the phone memory. Remember that we are asking you to encrypt the data when you are planning to sell it and not when you are planning to keep using your smartphone, because once you encrypt your data, you may have to de-crypt it again and again.

Conclusion

There are many applications available on the Google Play Store to encrypt the data but our sincere advice will be to use the default feature available in your Android Settings section. This is the best way you can take care of all the personal data available on the device and feel free to sell it.

This post has been written by Abhinav Singh, who is a founder member of NXTInsight. NXTInsight is all about informing the readers with the latest wearable gadgets popping up in the global market.

Source: Avast

nv-author-image

Abhinav Singh

Abhinav Singh, a software engineer who is very much interested in social engineering. He is responsible to manage all the social media profiles of Gadgets To Use. He also has a hobby of tracking new apps and gadgets and to share them with our readers as well.