While buying new smartphones has become much easier thanks to attractive installment plans offered by brands, some people would rather buy a second-hand phone for various reasons. Hence, the second-hand phone market continues to this day but with one caveat, a problem of user privacy which goes both ways.
For the buyer, it’s more of an issue that the seller could have left certain malicious software parting from their phone which could be used to spy on the new buyer. Although a possibility, this isn’t reported or done very often. Yet, on the other hand, what about the seller leaving their data mistakenly to the mercy of the buyer?
According to a study done by the University of Hertfordshire and commissioned by Comparitech, it has been found that among the 100 second-hand phones purchased by the former on eBay specifically for the study between January and June in 2018, 17% of them contained the previous owner’s personal data.
Image credit: Comparitech
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As seen from the data compiled, 17% which equates to every 1 in 6 of those phones has personally identifiable information(PII) including “thousands of private emails, intimate photos, contact lists, text messages, tax documents, bank account details, web browsing histories, and personal calendars.”
To be more specific with an example, one of these contained,
“A contact list with 30 entries, including the previous owner’s number, a rece ..
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