How to completely wipe data on your Android phone
Every day, thousands of people sell or give away their old mobile devices. To do a little research, we decided to buy some used mobile phones to find out if the data has been erased from them before their owners sell their devices.
The findings are astonishing: 40,000 photos including 750 photos of naked women and more than 250 photos of naked selfies of men, 750 emails and personal messages, 250 names and addresses, a collection of anime pornographic material, and the identities of four former owners of these cell phones.
How was this personal data discovered?
The problem lies in the fact that users thought they had deleted their data, but the phone's operating system apparently didn't do its job properly. The operating system deleted the corresponding pointers from the file folder and showed the space as free. In reality, however, the files were still there and remained on the drive.
If the user continued to use their phone normally, the new data would overwrite the old data, but since they decided to sell device , that simply never happened. Our computer works the same way. I used a simple free software to recover deleted photos that I thought I had lost forever because they had not been covered by new data yet.
You can permanently delete your files with Avast Anti-Theft
The free Android app, Avast Anti-Theft, essentially deletes and overwrites all your personal files. All you have to do is follow the steps below to delete your personal data from your Android smartphone before selling it or simply giving it to another user.
1. Install Avast Anti-Theft on your Android device. The app is available for free on the Google Play Store.
2. Configure Avast Anti-Theft so that you can access your phone via your computer.
3. Activate the total purge via the application.
4. Log in to your My Avast account from your computer to wipe your Android phone. This will erase and overwrite all your personal data.
You can also watch the related video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulg59gzipv0
