Factory reset failing: How deleted naked selfies can be recovered from second-hand smartphones

Security experts, who purchased 20 used “securely wiped” smartphones from eBay, recovered thousands of photos from the devices.

15:21 11 July 2014

Security experts have issued a warning that personal items such as naked selfies can be recovered even from “securely wiped” Android handsets.

They said that some factory resets failed to properly delete data as they were able to recover thousands of photos of men and women in “various stages of undress” from second-hand phones.

The security experts who bought 20 used “securely wiped” smartphones from eBay, used advanced data retrieval techniques and recovered more than 40,000 photos including “more than 250 selfies of what appear to be the previous owner’s manhood”. The researchers were also able to identify the previous owners of four of the 20 handsets.

A Google spokesperson defended the OS, telling technology site Ars Technica that the researchers must have been using older Android devices and that their findings did not “reflect the security protections in Android versions that are used by 85% of users.”

This suggests that Android users running version 4.0 and later should be safe using built-in date wipe functions.

For iOS users, encryption is built in with all Apple devices apart from the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and first two generations of the iPod touch using Advanced Encryption Standard to secure data.