How to delete sensitive data on Android phone?

Question

I want to sell an old Android phone. How can I delete sensitive data on my Android phone with a MicroSD card from within Ubuntu, in a secure manner?

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

6

You can erase SD card using a command line tool called shred (manpage)

You can also refer to this discussion in askubuntu. How to delete file(s) in secure manner?

OR

For deleting everything on phone, Hard reset is OK. But I recommend flashing the original phone firmware. You can get instructions at XDA

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

Community

answered Mar 26 '13 at 10:53

Web-E

3

Is it established that any existing methods of overwriting data are sufficient to prevent any possible data recovery *on flash media?* Almost all the research in this areas applies specifically to magnetic hard disks. – Eliah Kagan Mar 26 '13 at 12:37
I have reinstalled CyanogenMod on that phone. So that is really enough to delete all the data on the phone in a secure manner? – BuZZ-dEE Mar 27 '13 at 10:47

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 26 '13 at 12:49

1

You can try in terminal:

 shred –remove –iterations=<num> <file>

e.g. : cd your memorycard name ls (to list the files) shred -remove -iteration=50 yoursensitivedatafile name

edited Mar 26 '13 at 12:49

BuZZ-dEE

answered Mar 26 '13 at 12:20

samnaction

2 Answers2