Factory Reset: AVAST detects thousands of files on reset smartphones!

The smartphone market is constantly evolving, following short cycles that require more innovation, improved performance and redesigned designs than ever before. Under these circumstances, the temptation to regularly replace the terminal leads to regularly, if not always, reselling our “old” phones. For those who can’t help giving in to each new release of the Samsung Galaxy or HTC One each year, the used market can quickly recover some of their initial investment.

However, under these circumstances, you should be as careful as possible and make sure you don’t resell a phone filled with personal information and other memorabilia photos that the new buyer will at best make fun of or at worst use against you again. Under these circumstances it is usually recommended to perform a factory reset, eg. a reset that returns the phone to its original state and return to the factory configuration. Thus, all data stored in the phone’s internal memory and all settings changed by the user will be permanently deleted, at least in theory.

In fact, even such a drastic measure (similar to reformatting a hard drive) may not be enough. Therefore, the AVAST Software teams, creators of the famous free antivirus, conducted an experiment on twenty second-hand smartphones of four different brands (HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung) that had been factory reset to check the effectiveness of the measure. . And the results are, so to speak, quite striking, because in about twenty terminals, no less than:

• 40,000 photos, including 1,500 photos of children, 750 photos of women, and 250 selfies
• 1000+ Google queries
• More than 750 emails and SMS
• more than 250 people
• four IDs from previous owners
• a properly signed loan application

Therefore, as we can see, factory reset isn’t always a miraculous solution to erase all personal traces that can be left on a smartphone. To fix this, AVAST recommends installing an anti-theft app such as AVAST Anti-Theft available in the Play Store. This type of application has the function of permanently deleting all data present on the phone, rendering it unusable.

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