I’ve seen some guides on how to destroy a hard drive so it no longer stores anything. I just read a topic in which people say that factory resetting an Android smartphone makes data unrecoverable. But if I no longer plan to use my old phone, is there a guide on how I can securely destroy it? I don’t want to carry my 3 old phones with me everywhere.
On modern smartphones, the drive is always encrypted. When you wipe it, the encryption key is deleted so the data is effectively gone. So really you don’t need to worry about wiping it, that’s mainly when you have a drive with unencrypted data on it. You definitely don’t need to destroy it either, after you wipe it you can sell it off safely.
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