The phone data that’s a nightmare to delete

Friday, September 26th, 2008

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.

 

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