A recent study of used smartphones, pursued by a company engaged in digital inspection, has showed how easy it is to retrieve data from old or lost devices, even in the case of factory reset. An expert from AccessData shared the results of his study and came out with consequences for corporations and consumers who do not choose a device, manage or dispose of it properly. I buy a lot of used phones and they still have tons of data", said Lee Reiber, director of mobile forensics at AccessData. If you take 10 smartphones, you can find data on 60% of them." As Reiber reports, at the direction of a client who was interested in scavenging on phones, which are sold by intermediaries and consumers on Craigslist and eBay, he employed AccessData tools to carry out an penetrating expertise of five secondary market devices. They were iPhone 3G, Sanyo 2300, HTC Wildfire, LG Optimus and HTC Hero. Of these five,iPhoneand an old Sanyo contained what Reiber called logical data. This data include account login information, contacts, calendar information, which can easily be used by anyone who has got your phone. Although all Android devices have been reset to factory settings, 4 of the 5 phones were still containing data which could be retrieved from the storage by a skilled person with inspection tools. "All five of them contained information from which we can determine their origin. It is either a serial number or an old phone number", wrote the expert. "We could determine the owner or location of.four phones out of five. The only phone we were unable to associate with a person and account information, was LG Optimum." Among the details found on the four phones there were a Social Security number, geographical location marks of the places where the user had taken photos, deleted text messages and summaries. "Since today everything is based on location, on one of the Android devices I found a place where the user had been launching the browser. So I entered the latitude and longitude found on the phone into the browser and got a photo with a view of someone's house." Even the old Sanyo flip phone, which are hardly thought to have too much sensitive information, had Yahoo account credentials, which had not been cared enough to change, and which Reiber used to log in as the former owner of the phone. Read the more here: https://www.dataretrieval.com/tips-and-hints/used-smartphones-treasure-trove-of-information-for-new-owners.html ...read more

Most times just a Simple, Sweep and Clean can save you aggravation and lost productivity. Try going through and un installing old programs you haven̢۪t used within the last 6 months and cleaning up your temp folders.If this doesn't help then it maybe something deeper rooted in your system.Hopefully this helps! ...read more

   When we throw away an electronics product, it goes into a landfill and rusts. We then purchase new products, which are made more cheaply, and our money goes to Korea and China. An alternative is to have our older products repaired. A repair might cost as much or even more than a cheaper replacement, but often the older units are built better - more ruggedly constructed and able to be serviced. Dollars spent locally on repairing older products provide jobs here and now in Cincinnati, and our money stays in the U.S.A., instead of going to foreign lands. Something to think about? ...read more