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Worse, the BlackJack II is a Windows-based phone, so when we hooked it up to a computer, we were able to access a few downloaded documents that weren’t immediately visible on the phone’s interface. The phone arrived at PCWorld’s office with the SIM card removed, but its internal memory contained email and contacts from the month before. The phone had belonged to a temporary employee who worked under May-Cole doing outreach for senior depression and mental-health issues when the employee’s grant ended, May-Cole decided to sell the phone. The seller was Rebecca May-Cole, executive director for the Pennsylvania Behavioral Health and Aging Coalition. Removing the SIM card stops the phone from communicating with the network, but doesn’t erase the email and contact lists already on the phone.Įmployer Rebecca May-Cole didn’t wipe her employee’s data correctly before selling the company phone.One of the phones we acquired for this article was a Samsung BlackJack II purchased off eBay. That’s where we found data on the five phones that still contained some. But people seem to forget (or not know) about wiping the phone’s internal memory. The SIM and SD cards had been removed from all the phones we purchased. Many phones also have additional data stored on removable SD Card media. Smartphones usually have at least two stores of memory: a SIM card, and the phone’s internal memory. We found that 5 of the 13 phones still had information on them. To see just how critical the problem is, we bought 13 Internet-capable phones from various sellers on eBay, small businesses, and flea-market stands in the San Francisco Bay Area. And consumers seem to be just as uninformed when it comes to eliminating the data on their old phones. PCWorld’s previous investigations have shown that people don’t properly erase the data on their old computer hard drives before they dispose of their laptops and desktops, even when the data includes their own sensitive information and that of others. And as phones get smarter, they’re ever more likely to hold bank account passwords, personal email, or private photographs that anyone with the right kind of motivation could exploit. Whether it’s because sellers are lazy or naive, cast-off phones still contain troves of information about their former users. The owners had not been able to wipe the phones remotely.Your old cell phone data can reemerge from the past to haunt you. Stands at the flea market were selling stolen phones.