Exploits, Tools & Data Recovery · Deleted vs Reset: Myths & Reality · Lesson 5 of 5

Challenge: The Phone Donation Drive

Prepare donated phones and answer donors' worries about deleted data.

The brief

You're Lena, a volunteer at a community center that refurbishes donated phones for people who need one. Your job is to check each phone and answer donors' questions honestly. Today's box holds three phones:

• Phone A: an iPhone from 2023. The donor used Erase All Content and Settings after signing out of her Apple Account.
• Phone B: an Android phone from 2012, running Android 4.1. The donor says he never turned on encryption, and he factory reset it last night.
• Phone C: an Android phone from 2021, factory reset by its donor. It still has a microSD card in the tray, which the donor used as portable storage for photos.

Your manager wants to know which phone's reset deserves the least trust before anything goes out to a new owner.

The stuck setup screen

You reset Phone C again to be safe, take out its microSD card to return to the donor, and start setup. The phone connects to Wi-Fi, then stops at a screen asking for the Google Account that was previously signed in. Nobody at the center knows that password, and the donor is out of town until next week. When you call him, he admits he never removed his account from the phone before resetting it, because he assumed the reset would take care of everything.

The worried donor

A new donor, Marcus, hasn't handed over his phone yet. It's a 2022 Android phone he still uses every day, with cloud backup turned off. Yesterday he deleted a long chat with a former business partner in a messaging app, and this morning he sent a few dozen new messages to other people. He asks you, "Is that chat really gone from my phone?" He hasn't reset the phone, and he doesn't plan to until he donates it.

The headline

At the end of the day, Marcus shows you a headline on his phone: "Factory resets don't work: researchers recover 40,000 photos from wiped phones." The article is a few years old, but it was shared again in a group chat this week, and several of his friends now say they'll keep their old phones in a drawer instead of donating them. He wants to know whether he should still donate his phone once he has reset it.