Before buying a phone, we take plenty of advice and do a lot of research but what about selling a phone? Our smartphone these days keeps all our sensitive data regarding our personal, social and business lives. It is very important to take all the preventive measures before selling your phone so that they cannot access your information in any case. Let’s see what we can do to ensure that our data is not accessible to others.
First and the foremost thing to do is encrypt your data before factory reset. Actually, factory reset doesn’t wipe your data completely and there are various possible ways to regain the data with the tools easily available on the internet. By encrypting your data, no tool will be able to decrypt your data.
Android 6.0 or above have this by default encryption however to ensure encryption there is a setting available. You just need to navigate to Phone settings>>Security>> encrypt phone. This setting might be at a different location based on your phone however it is always easily accessible.
Once you have encrypted your data, you need to log out of all your important accounts like google accounts, emails etc. and hit factory reset to wipe off all your data. This will erase all your data, however, to be extra sure that your data is inaccessible load dummy data. Yes, because resetting factory data will remove all the data from your device even the SD card, however, there is still a chance that some percent of your data can be accessed and just to exclude this possibility loading dummy data is the best option. Dummy data can be anything just like a garbage stuff to overwrite your previous storage. Just store some HD movies or videos and that would be all. After that factory reset your phone once again and just to be doubly sure repeat the process once again to wipe everything to the core. You do not any special tool to wipe your data just a bit more of precaution and patience.
Once you have wiped your data please revoke access to the phone from Facebook, Google etc. To remove devices from your Google account, sign in to myaccount.google.com. Go to security and then device activity & notifications and select the model you have wiped. Now you need not worry about your data and you can sell your phone without the second thought. Good Luck!!!
