Don’t keep secrets on your cell phone; it might not keep them

[kurth]

Don’t keep secrets on your cell phone; it might not keep them
By Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Don’t tell your cell phone any secrets. It might not keep them. Secondhand phones purchased over the Internet surrendered credit card numbers, banking passwords, business secrets and even evidence of adultery. One married man’s girlfriend sent a text message to his cell phone: His wife was getting suspicious. Perhaps they should cool it for a few days. "So," she wrote, "I’ll talk to u next week." "You want a break from me? Then fine," he wrote back. Later, the married man bought a new phone. He sold his old one on eBay Inc. for $290. The guys who bought it now know his secret. The married man had followed the directions in his phone’s manual to erase all his information, including lurid exchanges with his lover. But it wasn’t enough.

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. A company, Trust Digital of McLean, Va., bought 10 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... The recovered information was equal to 27,000 pages - a stack of printouts 8 feet high. "We found just a mountain of personal and corporate data," said Nick Magliato, Trust Digital’s chief executive...

The 10 phones Trust Digital studied represented popular models from leading manufacturers. All the phones stored information on flash memory chips, the same technology found in digital cameras and some music players. Flash memory is inexpensive and durable. But it is slow to erase information in ways that make it impossible to recover. So manufacturers compensate with methods that erase data less completely but don’t make a phone seem sluggish. Phone manufacturers usually provide instructions for safely deleting a customer’s information, but it’s not always convenient or easy to find... Trust Digital resurrected erased e-mails and other information from a used Treo phone provided by The Associated Press after it was reset and appeared empty. The AP ordinarily purges its phones the correct way, but for demonstration purposes turned over a reporter’s phone that had been simply reset to see whether Trust Digital could recover the information. It did...

http://business.bostonherald.com/technologyNews/view.bg?articleid=155303&format=text

[bonito]

1. Old computers as well

Remove the hard drive and destroy, but you might want to remove the cool magnets inside.