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Half of Used Phones Still Contain Personal Info
jhernik writes "More than half of second-hand mobile phones still contain personal information of the previous owner, posing a risk of identity fraud. A study found 247 pieces of personal data stored on handsets and SIM cards purchased from eBay and second-hand electronics shops. The information ranged from credit card numbers to bank account details, photographs, email address and login details to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. According to data security firm CPP, 81 percent of previous owners claim they have wiped personal data from their mobile phones and SIM cards before selling them. However, deleting the information manually is 'a process that security experts acknowledge leaves the data intact and retrievable.'"
Phone manufacturers and telcos are making the wiping much harder than it needs to be. I guess they do that because they don't make any money from you selling your phone second hand. This is especially true for iPhones and Android. Are Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 really the only phones that have complete wipe feature built-in? I dont even mean the usual delete, but actual multiple times overwriting. While it's more important for business users (and why RIM and Microsoft pay more attention to such details), it's something casual people need too. It needs to be on other phones than business ones too. But like it is, you usually get what you pay for - if you pay for professional software companies like Microsoft, you get products that have been though over and made secure. If you get something amateurish, well, that's what you get. The kind of things business users need are the first things forgotten in those devices and software products.
Erasing things manually?
When I gave my old phone to my mother, I went into setup and selected "factory reset". That's it, phone wiped. I then took out the SIM card, with my contact list, and moved it to my new phone, and put her SIM card into the phone instead.
That was a Samsung SGH-Z500, but as far as I know, every phone I've had has had a factory reset option. I even used it several times on my old Nokia 9110 company phone, although for other reasons (you'd think that phone was running Windows ME).
i bought a cellphone 3 years ago, and i will continue using it until it breaks, then i will smash it with an 8 pound sledge hammer against an anvil until it is a shredded pulp, then i will sweep up the pieces and put it in the trash, good luck trying to get any info off of it after that...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
So, anyone got a phone I can have? I promise to whipe it
SSC
The main problem here isn't that people aren't deleting their data, it's that phones don't come with block-level or at least filesystem-level encryption for all data by default. If you're marketing something to everyone, including the idiots, you should make it idiot-proof.
How about a fairly accessible mandatory wipe option being required in new models? Might require SIM to be taken out first. Not too hard surely. Probably easier to do in Europe though ... cell phone companies would need pushing.
If your data is stored on chip or CDs, just nuke it. All it takes is a solid 10 seconds in the microwave ~ on high. Of course, I bare no responsibility for any toxic fumes that may be released. You've been warned.
Life is not for the lazy.
The telcos like to lock down phones and cut out apps from the manufacturers
When you look at most phones (especially the pre-smart phone units), there are not easy ways to wipe it back to factory settings. There's no easy way to check if "wipe factory settings" really deleted the data or just removed pointers to the data. There is no sim to pull. And thus, there's no obvious way for the average consumer to dispose of their personal information other than to destroy the phone itself.
I bought my latest (used) car just over a year ago. It has a bluetooth handsfree system built in.
Imagine my surprise when I tried to call home one day to find that i was hearing a stranger's voice on the answering machine! Apparently the previous owner programmed her "Home" number into the car itself rather than accessing the address book from her device.
I still have not figured out how to delete the entry!
C'mon, the answer is simply 'half of all phones are lost/found or stolen'. That's why the 'owners' don't care.
Why would you sell your SIM card? That's what the buyer needs to get from the carrier in order to activate the phone. If you sell your SIM card then it's not a case of data loss but an ignorant person.
Darryl L. Pierce "What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman?"
...With the chorus of responses above. Every time I get a new phone I have to go through a goddamn voodoo ritual of clicking around on Google for a couple of hours trying to figure out where the phone manufacturer and/or the original carrier of the phone decided to hide, password protect, lock out, or otherwise attempt to obscure the method for doing a "master reset" or full wipe of the phone's data. I think in the USA this problem is compounded by the ubiquity of contract phones -- non-nerds can basically only buy a cell phone from a service provided, tied to that service provider in this country -- and it's common practice for cell carriers to lock out, password, and hide features of their phones in their BS custom firmware (Which also probably locks you out of firmware updates from the manufacturer, at least on basic "dumb" phones. Oh, and it has a thirty-second slideshow animation complete with irritating jingle and the carrier's logo that plays when you power on and off, which can't be silenced or skipped.). Apparently they do this to force users to buy games and ringtones through them at exorbitant cost instead of just hooking up a USB cable and copying some MP3's/Java Apps from their PC, but this causes other problems like tucking the Master Reset option in a damn maintenance menu that's locked with a password that only the cell phone company is supposed to know. And sometimes they do other fun things like disabling Bluetooth file transfer, disabling tethering, disabling local video playback, etc., etc.
This is a practice that needs to stop. This article is just another example of why.
Some manufacturers have some key combinations to erase the device. Sometimes the manuals actually the steps required.
Not affiliated, but these guys have a db of the commands:
http://www.recellular.com/recycling/data_eraser/default.asp
Wearing pants should always be optional.