Ever planning to give away your android device, then it’s a wise idea to wipe all your personal informations to save your privacy for your personal security.
A recent study performed by the security software company Avast has shown that factory reset feature that is built into the Android OS is not effective at completely removing your personal information from your unused devices. From a number of Android smartphones they were able to recover an enormous amount of personal informations including 250 contacts, 750 emails and text messages and more than 40,000 photographs. Using a specialized software recovery tool can make things even worse.
A simple method instead of using specialized data deletion tools to wipe all your personal information is to encrypt your phone’s data before doing a Factory Reset.
The encryption process scrambles the data on your phone or tablet, meaning that even if wipe does not delete everything, the information left will be garbled and can only be scrambled by using a special key or combination of keys. As your data is encrypted and performing a factory reset overwrites the encryption pin, blocks from retrieving the data. For most cases, encrypting the data and then performing a factory reset will be enough.
However, if you are particularly concerned about security, you can add another layer of protection by loading some fake information onto your device. You can load fake contacts, photographs or any other type of data you choose, and then perform another factory reset to delete the fake data.
These final steps may seem a little odd, but loading and then deleting fake information makes it even harder for someone to find your data because it is buried underneath the fake content. This step can be repeated as many times as necessary until you are completely comfortable that your information has been completely deleted from your device.
