Avast Buys 20 Used Phones, Recovers 40,000 Deleted Photos

An anonymous reader writes: The used smartphone market is thriving, with many people selling their old devices on eBay or craigslist when it's time to upgrade. Unfortunately, it seems most people are really bad at wiping their phone of personal data before passing it on to a stranger. Antivirus company Avast bought 20 used Android phones off eBay, and used some basic data recovery software to reconstruct deleted files. From just those 20 phones, they pulled over 40,000 photographs, including 1,500 family pictures of children and over a thousand more.. personal pictures. They also recovered hundreds of emails and text messages, over a thousand Google searches, a completed loan application, and identity information for four of the previous owners. Only one of the phones had security software installed on it, but that phone turned out to provide the most information of all: "Hackers at Avast were able to identify the previous owner, access his Facebook page, plot his previous whereabouts through GPS coordinates, and find the names and numbers of more than a dozen of his closest contacts. What's more, the company discovered a lot about this guy's penchant for kink and a completed copy of a Sexual Harassment course — hopefully a preventative measure."

Obvious!

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought 40~ used iphones off ebay and at least 12 of them were still logged into social media accounts (facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat) and had thousands of photos and videos. i did not see any nudes but i did have fun with some of their profiles.

Re:Garbage In

[djdanlib]

> Google's Android phones flat out REFUSE to uninstall Facebook, for example.

It uninstalls just fine, thank you very much.

Or are you referring specifically to Nexus devices?

Re:"What to do before selling or giving away your.

[SJ]

Nope... Apple iPhones actually securely erases the encryption keys which renders the contents of the storage useless.

It's a big button called "Erase All Contents and Settings". It does precisely that.

Re:This post is an advert

[mendax]

I don't know what you're doing. I tried several times without success. soylentnews.com was always replaced with slashdot.org.

D'oh! I'm an idiot. It helps if the href contains an "http://" as part of the URL. Ok. No more conspiracy theories now, at least not on this issue.

Re:Really?

[David Jao]

They could have filled out the loan application somewhere else and uploaded it to a service like Dropbox. Viewing it later on the phone would leave a cached copy on the phone.