As smartphones gets refreshed with more advanced features every year, people tend to switch phones and advanced users will know how to kill their data should they be selling their old phone away, however if you have used your phone to store confidential data, you might just want to keep your phone in your drawer as computer researchers over at University of Cambridge has just found out that ‘Factory Reset’ doesn’t kill everything, which means your text, emails, pictures and even login details can be restored easily.
Of course not all Google powered devices are being tested, the test devices affected include the HTC One M7, HTC Sensation XE,Motorola Razr I, Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung Galaxy S2, Samsung Galaxy S Plus, Google Nexus 4 and some other unnamed devices. For instance, the HTC One M7 didn’t erase its internal memory despite using the phone’s ‘Reset’ feature or recovery ‘Factory Reset’ feature, which I have also personally experienced on my very own One M7 smartphone when I got back from my friend recently.
Not all the phones have the same issue as the One M7, but researchers have mentioned that even deleting photos and files manually on these phones will not help as flash storage is ‘notoriously difficult to erase’, while part of the blame can be pushed to Google’s Android way of handling its ‘factory reset’ feature, manufacturers are also to be blamed on failing to implement a special instruction on their phones to destroy data traces completely when performing a reset.
If your personal data is handled by some third party apps on your Android device, you won’t need to worry that much if they provided a way of revoking user access on your old device. This report is really scary, given that we’ve reviewed numerous smartphones and merely passed back to the PR agency by simply doing a simple ‘factory reset’, from now on we had better be careful with these devices and as for consumers, you had best better to keep your smartphone or smash it to pieces if you do not want risking your personal data compromised.
