UK: There is an interesting new report out by Which? Magazine, which is a consumer organisation in the UK. The Magazine bought a number of PCs from eBay apparently, and was able to recover thousands of files from the hard disks.
Their conclusion was that the only way to permanently get rid of the files is to take a hammer to the hard disk – on the basis that it’s the only surefire way to damage the disk enough beyond recognition.
(As an aside, remember Mission Impossible 3? There were two laptops toasted in a scene where a grenade goes off in a room – and yet latterly they were able to recover information from one of the hard disk platters that was “ruined” – see, movies are an accurate representation of real life) 🙂
Anyway, I digress – my point was going to be whether you do, or don’t, manage the data on your mobile device well. It’s often stated that a lot of people store very sensitive information like Bank card PINs in their mobiles, and in fact sometimes even the standard data itself (like contacts) might be ‘valuable’ if you are a politician, or celebrity!
A lot of people I think rely on the ‘master reset’ option on mobile device to erase all data on-device now, before selling or passing it on – but I know at least one device that doesn’t totally wipe ALL data when a master reset is done – likely because what it actually does is restore factory SETTINGS, rather than deleting user data..!
So that said, do we know for sure that all the data has been removed for the memory on mobile devices when we have “reset” them? Quite possibly no. Which means, according to the PC logic, that you should take a hammer to your old mobile….maybe! 😉