Before you toss or sell an old laptop or cell phone, it’s important to wipe the hard drive or you could be giving up a treasure trove of personal information to an identity thief.
Just deleting files and logging off is not enough.
“Anything that might be stored locally on a device, like photos, videos, or any personal documents, may still be on there if the only thing you’ve done is log out of different accounts,” said Consumer Reports Tech Editor Nicholas De Leon.
First, you need to back things up using an external drive or cloud-based service. Then search online for specific factory reset directions for your device. It can be done on laptops, tablets, smartphones, wearable tech, and more.
Even after a factory reset, a very determined hacker could still access your old files, although that’s unlikely.
“Say, you’re selling a laptop on eBay or something like that. You could just physically remove the hard drive so that when you sell it or give it to someone else your data that was on the computer is no longer there because the hard drive is no longer there,” De Leon said.
The surest way to protect your data permanently is to destroy the hard drive with a hammer or drill. YOu could also destroy the device and recycle the materials.
De Leon says there are other devices that also need a factory reset.
“TVs, gaming consoles, streaming devices like Roku, things like that. These all have your data on there, so you want to make sure to get rid of it before passing it onto the next person,” De Leon said.
It’s also important to remove any external storage in your devices, like SD cards. And for smartphones and tablets with cellular, you’ll also want to find and remove the SIM card. If you don’t have the tool to remove it that came with your device, you can use a paper clip instead.