Factory Reset Will Not Make Your Phone Squeaky Clean

You’ve only waited for your free Sun load to expire. After two years of service, finally, you are ready to let go of your first-ever Android phone you bought from your first job. Hey, everybody needs a fresh start. Even departing from your old Smartphone is a logical step to have a new phone, duh. You weighed the pros and cons. Instead of selling it online, you decided to hand it down to your younger techie brother. Considering there are newer models out there, who will bother to buy your old unit, anyway? You have searched for your dream phone. All you have to do is to let the old one go, and then it is about time to do the hardcore Android factory reset.

 

Android factory reset is the no-turning-back-point where the phone will restore to its default settings the way it was shipped from the factory. From a technical standpoint, TechTarget defines it as “a feature that erases all device settings, user data, third-party applications, and associated application data from an Android device’s internal flash storage…” What are the reasons we opt to do a factory reset? Maybe the phone lags or hangs. It freezes when you open or switch to a new window or return to the home screen. The phone pops a lot of “force close” window when it should not be in the first place. A virus got into your Android’s system. In a lighter note, you are planning to sell or dispose of your device.

This process is synonymous to cleansing your phone or – so we thought. But, DidYouKnow that security software giant Avast discovered something distressing you wished you could demand your phone back from the buyer and perform a real data wipe out? Avast bought 20 second hand phones on eBay that claimed they were “wiped” using Android factory reset. To test if they were clean they downloaded online and ran FTK (Forensic Toolkit) Imager. This software could restore deleted data and it is free for everyone. Did Avast succeed? Yes, sorry to say, they did.

What did they find out? As posted on their blog, they were able to retrieve “more than 40, 000 stored photos; 750 photos of women in various stages of undress; 750 emails and text messages; 4 previous owners’ identities; one completed loan application; and more.” Quite scandalous, isn’t? When we say scandalous, they even recovered “below the belt” selfies… Oh, you know what we mean.

Based on their study, and we will explain it in a more layman’s term, imagine a file cabinet of a resigned employee. This said employee labeled the cabinet as “available” for turnover so a new employee can re-use it. What he failed to do was to remove all the contents or files inside the cabinet. This is the same as a factory reset. Scary, isn’t? You assumed that your phone’s contacts, images, text messages, and other sensitive information were non-existent against prying eyes. Avast proved this was wrong. Now, we have to look for alternative methods better than Android factory reset.

This experiment, however, only involved older versions of Android according to Google. We do hope that recent versions have already built-in security restrictions against data recovery tricks. Just to play it safe, perform a data encryption first before hitting the factory reset button. An encrypted data is similar to a garbled text and it is unreadable to non-authorized people. You need a passcode to decrypt or read it. Using this method, your data and your identity will be safe against cyber attacks or the itchy hands of your techie brother.