Let’s say you’ve upgraded your phone and you’re thinking about selling your older model. That, in and of itself, is entirely understandable — why wouldn’t you want to sell a phone you’re no longer using? But the nature of owning a smartphone in 2020 means that at least some people looking to sell their phones might need to scrub it of — shall we say — intimate images before putting them up for sale.
A new article by Tarek Barkouni at Vice offers a host of tips for people looking to make sure that their phones are free from any images that they wouldn’t want to share with a stranger before selling them. As the article notes, it isn’t enough to simply delete photos from the phone itself. We live in an era of automatic cloud backups, after all. And the same tools designed to be sure that you don’t accidentally lose your photos can also make it harder to purposefully delete photos from a specific device.
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The whole article is well worth reading. Among the details Barkouni reveals that may be useful to know: if you’re deleting photos from an iPhone, you should unpair your Apple Watch (if you have one) before doing so. With Android phones, encrypting your old data before selling it is important. And Android’s theft protection software can also interfere with getting photos off of a specific phone for good.
The days of easily deleting images from a phone are long gone, unfortunately — but with the right set of guidelines, making sure your private information won’t end up in the hands of a stranger is eminently doable.
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