Be Wary About Selling Your Used Cell Phone

Selling your used cell phone when you upgrade to a newer model seems like a no-brainer thing to do. The proceeds of the sale can help defray the costs of the new phone, and chances are you won’t be using it much anymore anyway. Some phones can fetch a couple hundred dollars on online auctions like EBa but are the privacy concerns worth the few extra dollars?

Just because a seller “resets” his phone to erase sensitive data doesn’t mean that it’s gone forever. Trust Digital a provider of mobile security products conducted a test on 10 used cell phones to see what data they could extract from them. These were all higher end phones with capabilities to handle corporate Email clients.

Trust Digital was able to access sensitive information on nearly all of them. In fact, if all the recovered information were printed it would be 27,000 pages long. Other personal information recovered was one company’s plans to win a multimillion-dollar contract, E-mails about another firm’s $50,000 payment for a software license and bank account login and password information.

We found just a mountain of personal and corporate data,” said Nick Magliato, Trust Digital’s chief executive. Many of the phones were owned personally by the sellers but crammed with sensitive corporate information, underscoring the blurring of work and home. “They don’t come with a warning label that says, ‘Be careful.’ The data on these phones is very important,” Magliato said.
One phone surrendered the secrets of a chief executive at a small technology company in Silicon Valley. It included details of a pending deal with Adobe Systems Inc., and e-mail proposals from a potential Japanese partner: “If we want to be exclusive distributor in Japan, what kind of business terms you want?” asked the executive in Japan.

Before you log in to sell off an old phone, you might want to consider the risk associated with it. Even if your phone doesn’t store important information about your company, it stores information about you that is private. You don’t want to just that over to somebody, do you?

Resource: CNN.com