Selling your old Android phone? Follow these steps to keep data safe

With upgraded models of Android smartphones coming so frequently, we often feel the need to sell our existing phone and purchase new one. However, smartphones being the big repository of our private data that is meant to be confidential, special care should be taken to dispose of all our information from the older phone before passing it to some other person.

Here we have chalked down a few points following which you can ensure that your Android phone is no longer bearing any information having the potential to breach your privacy.

Backup your data

Foremost thing to do is to back up the data of your older phone to safe storage. The move from older phone to newer phone will be smoother if you have your data backed up at some place so that you can copy it in your newer device from there.

There are various ways to store your data, out of which cloud storage backing is the easiest way around. Companies like Google and Dropbox provide facilities for cloud storage. Here we have given the step to back up data on Google.

Step 1: Select Backup & Restore or Backup & Reset after opening Settings menu.

Step 2: If “Back up my data” and “Automatic restore” are available on your phone, turn on both features by swiping the toggles.

Step 3: Tap each option and choose it to make sure the information is linked with your Google Account.

Disconnect all the accounts

Make sure that the smartphone you are selling has been disconnected from all linked accounts. This will include social media profiles, a WhatsApp account, a Google account, and a Microsoft account.

Leaving such accounts logged in may be disastrous to our privacy as it will give a free hand to anybody login into our virtual world.

Remove SIM and storage cards.

In a hurry, we often tend to make silly mistakes and leave the SIM card and storage card inside the smartphone.

Don’t forget to remove the SIM card and any microSD cards from your smartphone before selling it.

The microSD card should be removed beforehand as all the data on the storage card may be deleted if you leave it installed and restore your phone to factory settings.

Erase your data

Reset your smartphone’s factory data after backing up and safely transferring your data. Your phone’s RAM and storage will be effectively erased by doing this, making it available for use by the subsequent owner.

Factory reset takes some time so it’s better to charge the smartphone to full to have an uninterrupted process. To do data reset, you can pursue the following steps on your Android smartphone.

Go to the settings

Reset the phone by going to System > Advanced > Reset Options > Erase All Data (Factory Reset) > Reset phone

You might have to enter a PIN or password.

Tap Erase Everything to finish.

Prepare for sell

Now before wrapping the show, we need to ensure to keep all the available parts at its required place. Grab all of your phone’s accessories, including the charging wire and adapter, and give it a quick wipe down. Place them in the original box. And now your old smartphone is prepared for safe sale.