When smartphones started to feature built in cameras, you know that this double-edged sword would have roosters that will come home to roost eventually, and in some ways, they have already. Apart from taking photos of delicious meals prior to eating them, folks have also shot sexy and nude images of themselves, but what happens when you no longer want to use that phone? Deleting those images might be the standard step that ordinary folks take, but publicly available forensic security tools have the ability to extract deleted images from second-hand handsets.
This has allowed thousands of photos recovered, where among them include naked selfies from a slew of factory-wiped phones, by Avast, a security firm that is based in the Czech Republic. Apart from such racy photos, other extracted information ranged from emails to text messages and Google searches. According to security experts, there is one surefire way of deleting the data on your handset for good – and that is basically destroying it, which would include burning the device or smashing it to bits.
Older handsets that take the “factory reset” option will just erase the indexing of the data, while the data itself remains. According to Avast, 40,000 stored photos were reclaimed from 20 phones that were picked up from eBay, and over 750 of those happen to be ladies who were in different stages of undress, while another 250 selfies have been described to be “what appears to be the previous owner’s manhood”.
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