When you want to sell your old Android phone or give it away, the standard procedure is to restore it to factory settings. Restoring your phone to factory settings means having it like it was when it came out of the factory.
Here’s the catch. The security firm Avast claims that they were able to recover from old Android phones emails, texts and photos including hundreds of nude selfies using common software!
Therefore, protecting your data even in a phone wiped clean is of primary importance. When you delete a file from your device, the file is moved to the trash or bin. It continues to exist as a copy on the cloud. Especially beware of the Google Photos app which will store deleted videos and photos for 60 days and can be recovered unless you manually remove them from the trash.
Factory reset from time to time is a good practice. It helps you to clean up all the trash in your phone and get free space.
Additionally, your phone storage or your SD card may already have harmful files that contain malware, bugs, viruses and can threaten your device’s health and your privacy. Factory resetting can get rid of all this.
There are other ways too to ensure your data is erased beyond recovery.
If you must factory reset, ensure that the data you erase is gone. To do this you need to encrypt your phone. Encrypting means you are scrambling all the data and locking it in such a way that it cannot be read without a password.
Most devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow have mandatory encryption security. However, some low-end devices may not have this.
If your phone is running Android 5.0 Lollypop or lower and supports encryption then head to Settings, tap Security and then Encrypt phone, to scramble its data. You will have to wait for an hour or more so make sure that your phone is plugged in for charging. When the process is complete then do a factory reset as you normally would.
Now you can go a step further to render your data worthless by overwriting with new junk data. Set up your device but do not sign into any Google Account. Start recording videos at high resolution and do so till you fill up all the space. Then do another factory reset. This way your data will never be recovered.
There are yet other ways of wiping sensitive data from your device permanently. You could use a file explorer or file manager app. There are several free file explorers available for Android phones but I would recommend Google’s own File app. From your File app select the item and then tap trash. Or press the three dots and choose Delete. Confirm and delete again.
If your device has an old version of Android that does not support encryption then you could use apps such as iShredder, Shreddit or Data Eraser. All three are available for free download from the PlayStore. All three are very easy to use and have patented, military-grade security standards.
By far the best way to delete Android files is by using your Windows PC. Connect your phone to your PC by using a USB cable. Open File Explorer and select This PC and then double click your Phone’s drive icon.
Sometimes, it may say that the drive is empty. In this case, go to Settings–Connected devices–USB and then enable the option of File transfer there. Browse the folders on your phone or device to locate the file or files you want to delete.
If you want to delete photos or videos, open the DCIM folder and then Camera. Right-click on the item, select delete and confirm you want to delete it permanently. The file won’t be sent to the Windows Recycle Bin. It will be deleted for good.
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