Ways to keep your Privacy to Yourself before you sell out your old Smartphone

Earlier this week Avast showed us how risky it is if you sell your old smartphone just with a simple factory reset!

Well Avast offers data deletion tool but there are other steps you can take to securing your personal data before selling it off.

1. Encrypting
Encrypt your device before you are getting ready to wipe it off. Encryption option is available on your android smartphone. This process will scramble the data on your device, so even if the factory reset doesn't fully delete the data, a special key will be required to unscramble it.

To Encrypt your device, go to
Settings > Security > Encrypt phone.

2. Perform a factory reset
Next step you have to perform a factory reset. This will erase all of the data on your phone (you should backup anything you don't want to lose)

For Factory reset, go to
Settings > Backup & reset > Factory data reset

Well the next method is what I do mostly for usb drives lol 
This method works perfectly for me, follow these steps :
- clear up your device by a factory reset,
- then your free space with huge movies or random HD video clips, till the storage space gets full
- Now again perform another factory reset, thus erasing the content you loaded onto the device.

Well now even if the data recovery software recovers data, it would be random clips you loaded there (lol don't put up some copyright content) and your private content won't show up. There's a logic behind it as explained in the last post, but trust me it works.

Well if you still worried about your privacy, then repeat these steps few more times. Then try to recover some data with free recovery software from the web, if nothing personal shows up, you're good to go!

Check my Previous Post Here to notice all the risks what Avast found in selling your old phone without following the above steps.