Selling Your Smartphone Could Mean Selling Your Identity

Security specialists Avast Software reports that they have been able to identify sensitive personal data on used phones sold in pawn shops. For the experiment, Avast purchased 20 used smartphones five devices each in New York, Paris, Barcelona and Berlin and used widely available free recovery software to detect the data found on the devices.

Avast retrieved more than 2,000 personal photos, emails, text messages, invoices and one video containing adult content from phones that the prior owners had assumed was deleted. On two of the phones, previous owners had forgotten to log out of their Gmail accounts, risking having the new owners read or send emails in their name.

Avast performed a similar experiment two years ago with used phones that were sold by consumers online in the U.S. and found more than 40,000 personal photos, emails and text messages. Unfortunately, this year’s results reveal that even though smartphone technology is progressing, consumers still lack awareness around how to protect their sensitive personal data.

Because all the phones in this experiment came from pawn shops, Avast was able to consult with the shop owners prior to purchase. While each shop owner assured the buyer that the phones had been factory reset and that all data from previous owners had been wiped clean, Avast found that twelve weren’t, and of the phones that actually were factory reset, 50 percent still contained personal data, as they were running an outdated version of Android that had an improperly functioning factory reset feature. Some of the previous owners only deleted their files without doing a factory reset. However, this doesn’t mean that the files were removed completely — only the reference to the file was deleted. Other phone owners simply forgot to delete their data or do a factory reset.

While an original owner who sells an old phone to a pawn shop might take the necessary precautions to rid the phone of data, its unlikely that a seller who found or stole the phone, for example, prior to pawning it would take these same steps (and as we know, lost phones can end up in pawn shops). Scenarios such as these highlight both the responsibility of shop owners to properly wipe and reset phones prior to sale, and also the need for phone owners to utilize anti-theft software in the chance their phone is lost or stolen, in order to remotely wipe the data. “New Android phones are pretty safe when it comes to the factory reset, but used phones with older Android versions that have a less thorough reset feature are still being sold,” says Gagan Singh, president of mobile at Avast Software.

Through their research, Avast noticed that some people simply forget to delete their personal data and perform the factory reset before selling the device. To ensure that all data is removed, a user needs to overwrite the phone’s files. Without this, a user’s personal data could easily end up in the hands of the next owner of the phone. In the end, users are responsible for cleaning all sensitive and personal data from their devices prior to sale, and they should never rely on a shop owner to remove remaining data prior to reselling the phones.

Avast researchers were able to recover the following files from the 20 phones:

More than 1,200 photos
More than 200 photos with adult content
149 photos of children
More than 300 emails and text messages
More than 260 Google searches, including 170 searches for adult content
Two previous owners identities
Three invoices
One working contract
One adult video

“If you sell your phone, make sure you dont sell your identity and personal data in the same move,” adds Singh. “If your personal data gets into the wrong hands, it can be easily exploited for identity theft or blackmail, and explicit content could be uploaded to the Web. We know many of our users dislike the idea of strangers viewing their photos, so they should take the time to ensure their sensitive data is removed from their phones prior to selling them.”

Avast advises consumers interested in selling their used Android devices to first install the free Avast Anti-Theft app and then use the thorough wipe feature to permanently delete and overwrite all files on the device, thus making personal data irretrievable. Avast Anti-Theft can be downloaded for free from Google Play.

For more information, visit:
http://www.avast.com

iPhone and other Apple device users can find information about how to remove personal content prior to sale at:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201274
and
https://support.apple.com/kb/ph2701?locale=en_US