Roughly a quarter of all phones are discarded with enough personal data left in them to identify their owner, according to a new study. Given my recent experience, I’m surprised that figure isn’t somehere in the high nineties, because deleting data from a modern phone is like trying to clear sand off a beach with a pair of tweezers. 

My esteemed editor recently handed me the Nokia E71 he’d been testing. Because he’s a stickler for reviewing kit properly, it was stuffed full of his personal data, including his Exchange email, text messages and contacts.

Once I’d sent an email to our publisher with Tim’s recommendation of a huge pay rise for the hard-working, irreplaceable, online editor, I set about trying to wipe the data.  First, I formatted the memory card, but it seems all Tim’s personal files were stored on the phone’s internal memory and, oddly, there was no obvious way to format that.

So I dug out the manual and hard reset the phone to factory settings, but incredibly that wasn’t enough to shift the data either.   Which means either Nokia is pre-installing the personal data of PC Pro staff on all of its handsets or the hard reset is about as hard as The Sun crossword.

In the end, I resorted to deleting the data manually from each of the relevant folders. And it seems I’m not the only one who has trouble scrubbing data from Nokia devices. “It has taken us over a year to get talks going with Nokia that now allows us to wipe their phones,” said John Godfrey, from mobile recycling service, Sims Lifecycle Services, talking to The Guardian.  “To wipe it, you have to be able to access all the memory – and manufacturers don’t want you to do that for all sorts of commercial reasons.”

That’s plainly not good enough. Mobile phones are probably more recycle-worthy than any other gadget, because the networks tempt customers to upgrade long before the phone ceases functioning. But there’s no way consumers, and especially businesses, will send their phones to be reused if there’s any chance their sensitive data will go with it. Even my manual delete wouldn’t prevent a determined hacker from retrieving infromation from the phone’s memory. 

Instead of adding barcode readers, novelty wallpapers or all manner of other useless gubbins on our handsets, the phone makers should be working on a simple way to erase user data. It can’t be that difficult – Windows does it without even trying!