A Company in the states, called Trust Digital, recently purchased 10 mobiles off ebay to test their phone security tools on and found a stagering amount of personal and confidential business information on them. It is not really a surprise, since most devices tend to simply erase the index on the memory cards, rather than actually overwriting all the data with random bits. Think of your MP3 player, flash drive, PDAs, black berry's, etc.

Currently, the common advice is to smash your old device to bits, instead of selling it on, etc. I normally don't sell my old mobiles on, mostly because I have friends and family that have a need for an old phone. The main thing is that if you don't keep any sensitive information on your mobile, you don't have to worry. so what if someone can read your text messages that says: "where are you?", etc. Whatever information that may be sensitive that I may store on the mobile, is always criptic or non-threatening on its own. I never store passwords anywhere, other than possibly a few characters just to remind me which password goes to which account.

So, the moral of the story is, don't store anything on your mobile that you would not want a thief to be able to see your mobile got stolen in the first place. Encrypt everything that may be sensitive, and look for software to ensure you have properly cleared the device before selling it - I don't know of any, but I'm sure there's some good advice there :)

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