Have you ever sold an old smartphone on eBay? You might be interested to know that the apps, photos and even Google searches on your phone can still be recovered — even if you performed a factory reset.
The team at security software company Avast purchased 20 different phones on eBay and unleashed data-recovery tools on them to see what they could find. The results are persuasive evidence that resetting your phone back to factory settings doesn’t mean your data is gone forever.
From the 20 phones, Avast managed to recover 40,000 photos (including 1,500 family photos with children and 250 selfies of someone’s “manhood”), 750 emails, 250 contacts with names and addresses and even files such as a loan application and a completed sexual harassment course. Predictably, some of the recovered photos were pornographic, as reported by VentureBeat, with one of the previous owners clearly a fan of anime porn, an Avast representative is quoted as saying. Read more…
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