With new smartphones and tablets flooding the market every day, there is temptation to dispose there old phones for new ones. So, either they go for an exchange of old phones or sell their old gadgets.
The top area of concern now would be privacy protection of the user data. So personal data like SMS/MMS, contact numbers, personal camera pics or videos should not fall into wrong hands. So, users personal data need to be copied or backed using backup app like Titanium Backup, Carbon Backup first before it can be erased.
Dispose Your Old Phone / Tablet
Follow the guide, for proper disposal of your old device:
Sim card
Almost all old phones and tablets with access to mobile network have sim card, which needs to be transferred to your new gadget. Nowadays phones do not need sim card to save contact numbers and messages. But sometimes users may have personal data saved in their sim cards, so using the same sim card would protect those data.
Phone memory card
Now comes real culprit, your old phone external memory card have most of the user data saved in it. So if you are allowing the card to go away with your old gadget please take a backup of your personal data and format the memory card. Although erasing of memory card would help, but formatting the card will make sure no illegal recovery of data.
Phone internal memory
Phone internal memory card hold data related to apps installed, browser cache memory or other personal document stored. It’s the Factory reset,which will erase everything on your device, and it will also allow wipe out data in internal storage.
Other software data
Social app being the main importance in new gadgets, data stored as part of these app usage need to be wiped out. So your Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter logins need to be logged out. Other app data like browsers, Dropbox, Evernote, Astrid tasks also needs to be cleared before disposing off the old gadget. These above tasks can also be taken care while doing factory reset of the old phones or tablets.
The above steps will take care of the gadgets that are amicably disposed. You may also have scenarios where you have lost your gadgets or it is stolen. In these unfortunate cases there are other ways to protect your personal data’s, which will come up in my next blog. 🙂
