How To Remove Your Personal Information From Your Phone Before Giving It Away

Courtesy: HuffPost UK

You just bought a new phone and wanted to give the old one out to someone, or you are sending it to off for repairs. The question from this scenario is, what do you do to your phone first? 

Do you send it off to the person with your personal data? There is often news of phone engineers who access people's data and use them unlawfully?  

There was a case of a lady who sent her phone for repairs, but she left her naked pictures in her phone gallery. The engineer transferred the pictures to his laptop and threatened to release them online unless the lady paid him. When she refused to pay, he published them online. Would you want to find yourself in that kind of situation? If not, then read on to know more.

Step-By-Step Process To Remove Your Personal Information From Your Phone Before Giving It Away

To keep yourself from falling victim to data misuse, you need to take the steps below:

1. Prepare your phone for the transfer or repairs by removing the lock-screen password or pattern.
   
   
2. Back up your phone data into external storage to avoid losing your stored data or information.
   
   
3. After backing up your phone, rid your phone of all stored data. There are ways to do that depending on the type of phone you own. The phone can fall under the iOS or Android class.

iOS Phones

• Locate Settings on your phone
• Click on iCloud, locate "Find My iPhone," then tap "Turn off."
• After that, go back to Settings and then to iCloud
• From there, proceed to Sign Out. Select "Sign Out" and "Delete from my iPhone" when you see the option.

After that, you need to delete other data such as Contacts, Calendars, Photos, etc. It would be best never to delete them manually because they might be deleted but would be moved to junk or bin. Hence the best idea is to do a factory reset. The factory reset would return the phone to the way it was when fresh from the factory.

Apple Phone factory reset

• Go to settings
• Select General Tap Reset
• Select "Erase All Content and Settings
• Type in your passcode when the prompt comes on the screen

Android Phones

For every android phone, the first step to remove stored data from it is to remove your Gmail account from the phone before proceeding, as you will see below.

Samsung Phone

• Locate Settings
• Tap Cloud and tap Accounts
• Tap Email
• Select more, then choose "Remove Account."
• Proceed to Settings, then choose "General Management."
• Click "Reset" and select "Factory Data Reset."
• Tap on Reset Device to finish the process.

Google Phone

• Proceed to Systems and proceed to Advanced and tap Reset Options
• Tap Erase all data
• Reset your phone, then enter your PIN, pattern, or password
• Tap Erase everything
• Choose restart after your phone is done erasing

LG Phone

• Proceed to Settings
• Tap on the "General Tab," then tap Accounts, and then Sync
• Locate and choose the email account you want to remove
• Tap "More," then select "Remove Account."
• After that, reset your phone by navigating to "Settings," then "General."
• Proceed to "Backup and Reset."
• Choose "Data Reset," then reset your phone

Motorola Phone

• Locate the Settings icon
• Scroll down and locate "Privacy."
• Select "Factory Data Reset."
• You would see the check box "Erase Internal Storage." Check the box to remove all data from your phone.
• After that, tap "Reset phone."

Conclusion

After taking the above steps, the phone is as new then you can easily hand it over to whoever you want to with peace of mind. With these steps, you are ready to go. You can read more about how to protect your phone from unnecessary access to stay safe.

Source

#Tech
#iOS
#Android
#Apple
#Samsung