Cell Phone Users, Beware
Be careful what you do with your old cell phone when you upgrade to a new one. Even if you think you have deleted your e-mails and text messages, you haven't.
Selling your old phone once you upgrade to a fancier model can be like handing over your diaries. All sorts of sensitive information pile up inside our cell phones, and deleting it may be more difficult than you think.
A popular practice among sellers, resetting the phone, often means sensitive information appears to have been erased. But it can be resurrected using specialized yet inexpensive software found on the Internet.
Happily, I never caught the Crackberry addiction and don't even own one. Nor do I e-mail or text message on my cell phone. Even so, after reading this article, I'm glad I've never sold an old cell phone or computer. Better to dismantle them and destroy their innards.
Here's more from the article:
A company, Trust Digital of McLean, Va., bought 10 different phones on eBay this summer to test phone-security tools it sells for businesses. The phones all were fairly sophisticated models capable of working with corporate e-mail systems. Curious software experts at Trust Digital resurrected information on nearly all the used phones, including the racy exchanges between guarded lovers.
[hat tip Scribe]
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