A recent study named Privacy for Sale: A Study on Data Security in Used Mobile Devices & Hard Drives, by data recovery company Kroll OnTrack, found that most used hard drives, laptops, phones and other equipment that ended up on eBay and Amazon, had sensitive data still on them.
It isn’t that all these people sell their devices without a thought to the data on them; in three out of four cases, people do make some kind of attempt to wipe their devices. They may try partially effective solutions such as reformatting disk drives, quick-formatting them, reinstalling Windows, or performing partial overwrites. While people tend to be aware of the need to do something, then, they are usually not sure of their effectiveness. It doesn’t help that format processes such as Windows format come with little information about the effectiveness delivered.
