If you’ve ever considered selling your old mobile phone or computer, the first thing you’ve likely done is a “factory reset” to delete all of your personal data from the phone. After performing a factory reset, your phone is supposed to look like it did on the day you got it, right? Leading security company Avast recently put that theory to the test and the results were alarming.
For their study, Avast acquired 20 used Android phones, on Ebay, and were able to easily restore the personal information and data for the previous owners, including their personal photos, contact information, music, data files and contacts. Most surprisingly, the only technical tool they employed was data recovery software, commonly available online. As you can well imagine, that puts many users at heightened risk of having their personal information compromised by a stranger.
Many people assume that a factory reset will delete all of their personal information but that is not correct. Any time you “wipe” a storage device, such as a mobile phone, or a hard drive, the factory reset option will only remove the index information for the files on the drive but the data is still there. In fact, the data will remain on the phone or hard drive until it’s overwritten with other data, so it can be restored with the proper software, compromising your important business information. This is actually true of every storage device, including servers. As you can well imagine, this presents a unique problem for businesses whose users may have confidential information on their business mobile phones or other devices, such as laptops or tablet computers.
Clarus Communications can work with you to upgrade your business to new phones, both mobile and business, computers or servers, while ensuring that your confidential business data is transferred to your new hardware but not left on your old recycled devices. When you work with Clarus, you’re partnering with an experienced communications team, who can ensure that your data cannot be recovered from decommissioned phones or hard drives. Our thorough measures ensure that we’re protecting your sensitive business information, such as accounting information, personal financial data, customer information and other confidential files.
Clarus Communications provides telecommunications services to customers throughout the St. Louis metro region. If you would like more information about our data device disposal, we invite you to fill out the form on this page and one of our representatives will get back with you shortly.