Selling Your Phone? Wipe Your Data!

Selling Your Phone? Wipe Your Data!

A recently acquired Nokia 808 purchased through Ebay revealed — much to my surprise — that the seller did not bother to remove any personal information stored on the device.

“What a lucky knuckle head!” I thought to myself. From the minimal snooping that I did, emails and images were left on the device among who-knows-what-else. Lucky because I was the one who ended up with the potential privacy and identity theft nightmare.

Removing ALL personal data is generally a good rule to follow when selling your phone. Especially when you have sensitive data stored.

Here are some quick tips on how to remove all personal data on Nokia phones.

Hard Reset – Wipes all phone memory (note this does not remove contents of external memory card)
on the dialer type *#7530# default lock code is 12345.

Settings –> Phone –> Phone Management –> Factory Settings –> Delete data and restore

Glad that in this case no personal information was compromised. Also as a quick reminder, its a good idea to password protect your phone with a lock code. This way if it gets lost or stolen, your information is relatively safe.

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