Personal Identify is incredibly priceless in this cyber age. No matter what happens, ensuring that you don’t publish your personal details on Internet (especially, when you do not want to).
Smartphones are one of those devices which could possibly have complete information about you. Whether it would be your email accounts, social network accounts, or bank accounts, smartphones have the credentials of it all. So, it becomes very necessary to ensure that when you sell your smartphone to someone, you get it rid of all these details.
In this post, I would like to share few things that I believe are necessary to be taken care before you sell your smartphone. Things like clearing your bank information, email IDs and etc.
Important Things To Do Before Selling Your Smartphone Whether Its Android or iOS
Get the backup done
Before you start deleting stuff, first thing that I would like to recommend is to get the backup of your device done. You should atleast take the backup of contacts, SMS and call logs. And this list can accomodate few more things like apps and all, provided you want to backup them. Get it done on top priority because with these backups, restoring things on your smartphone won’t be any pain.
Erase Smartphone’s Storage
For a smartphone, phone’s storage is everything. Whether it’s apps, SMS or call logs, everything goes on to phone’s memory. Before the device is handed over to new owner, ensure that this memory is totally cleared. You can either manually erase call logs, phone contacts, SMS, files, apps or you can Google to find out a way to remove things from your phone. Every manufacturer have their own way to delete things from their products.
So, it would be better to check out such way first. I have shared a number of posts on how to factory reset different devices. See if you find anything for yourself.
Remove Memory Card
Make sure that you take the memory card from your smartphone because it could contain number of files and other personal things. So, either remove the memory card or format it completely before handing the smartphone over to the new owner.
Do A Dry Run
Once its all done, turn your smartphone ON and see if you are able to use thing like email account, cloud storage, social networks or any other service that you use. This is just to ensure that you have completely cleaned your smartphone. And this is the reason, factory reset is highly recommended before selling the smartphone.
Apart from these things, I do not think if there is anything else that we should do in terms of cleaning the data from the smartphone. Do comment and share, if you think I missed something.