

However, if you want to completely wipe your android phone then the answer to this problem is actually simple, all you need to do is encrypt your phone data before factory resetting it. Also, this gives you a chance to recover deleted data. It’s a good practice, but it assumed that you are still in control of your device. This also avoids the wear of Flash Memory, which has a limited number of writes in their lifespan. Eventually, new content would be written, so it seemed superfluous to write zeros or random numbers on top of it. In a time when hard drives were very slow, OS makers found that it was much better to mark the space as free instead of actually (physically) deleting the content.

Now, you must be thinking that WHY this is happening? Actually, it does take space in your memory, but it is not shown to you and when you start using the phone again, this data is overwritten. This means, it is actually quite easy to gain all this personal information just by using a simple tool. In a research by Avast! a popular Anti-Virus company, 20 used Android phones were bought from eBay and with the help of Data-recovery tools, they managed to recover, above 40,000 photos, 250 contacts, 750 Texts and emails and other such personal data. If you just do a simple Factory reset and someone gets their hands on your phone, they can easily recover most of your personal information with the use of such a data-recovery tool. That including your Photos, emails, Texts and contacts, etc.īut all the data is present in your phone memory and can be easily recovered using a free data-recovery tool such as FKT Imager. This information is actually “marked as deleted” and hidden so you can’t see it at a glance. When you factory reset your Android phone, even though your phone system becomes factory new, but some of the old Personal information is not deleted. But that’s not the case, some of the data, including personal information, still remains accessible on the local storage, even after Factory reset! One would think that all the personal information is completely deleted and safe from other peoples’ eyes. However, one of its main uses is to delete all data before getting rid of your phone, whether to sell it, give it to someone or just throw it away. Android’s “Factory reset” option is perfect for use when you are having issues with your phone or just want a completely clean phone to start with again.
