Avast : Wiping your Old Android doesn't truly help when it comes to Privacy

Security software firm Avast bought 20 used phones from ebay as a test to see what they could find on theoretically “wiped” phones.

Then they simply used available recovery software to restore deleted files. The amount of data we were able to retrieve was astonishing and proves that simply deleting is not enough!

The stuffs that were found are as follows:
More than 40,000 stored photos
More than 1,500 family photos of children
More than 750 photos of women in various stages of undress
More than 250 selfies of the previous owner’s manhood
More than 1,000 Google searches
More than 750 emails and text messages
More than 250 contact names and email addresses
Four previous owners’ identities
One completed loan application
& One phone even had a competitor’s security software installed, but unfortunately it did not help it's owner as it revealed the most personal information out of all the phones we analyzed.

Well this wasn't surprising for me but for those people who doesn't know, it's the worst nightmare! Stalkers, enemies, and thieves can abuse personal data to stalk, blackmail and steal people’s identities. They can use this information to watch people’s every move, exploit their strange fetishes, open credit cards in their name, or even continue what they started by further selling their personal information online.

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.

The stunt is a part of an awareness campaign by Avast to make people, specifically Americans, realize just how insecure their mobile phones are.
Deleting files from your Android phone before selling it or even restoring it to factory settings is not enough. You need to overwrite the files, making them irretrievable. Hence Avast tells us to install their Anti-Theft app from the Google Play Store. Once you have the app installed, turn on the “thorough wipe” feature within the app. You'll need to create a my.avast account that allows users to remotely wipe their phones in theft cases. And the phone is clear!

Well when you delete a file, it’s not really deleted. Rather the system deletes pointers that correspond to the file and marks the space as available so that it can eventually be overwritten. But until it’s overwritten, the file can still be restored. This is true for your cellphone and PC.

So in my next post, I'll be providing a few simple tricks incase if you don't need that app for now, or probably save your battery & RAM that could be used by that app as you won't be selling your Smartphone soon.

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Update : Check the new post that will provide you some tricks to Keep Your Privacy to Yourself here

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