Guide: Safeguarding Your Private Contents on your phone/memory card/pendrive

Let’s face it. Almost every one of us have our own mobile phone, portable storage (pendrive, memory card, portable hard disk), etc to store our data. Chances are on most people these so-called ‘data’ actually contains photographs, videos, which some of them can be private.

It isn’t hard to search for stolen private photos and videos of many people on the web nowadays. The question is, how did the photos and video get found and circulated?

Most of us have taken basic security measures – that is to erase everything in our phone and memory card/storage before we pass it to another person, or even sell it off. There’s one fundamental mistake here, that is – even though you have formatted/deleted the files on those media, they are still there! That’s right, most applications that formats your storage devices only remove the reference to the files stored in it, but the content of the files are still there!

Think of it this way – you have a cupboard full of labeled files. What formatting does is only to remove those labels, but the files are indeed still there to be found to anyone who wants to spend enough time to actually look for it.

It’s Easy!

I’ve found a measure that is very easy to do, cheap as well as very practical that all of us can take right before we sell off our handphones/memory cards/portable storage devices. The steps are very simple:

First, format the storage media (for phones, reset it to the factory settings)
Next, fill up the storage/memory card/phone with tons of mp3s until it is full
Now, delete the mp3 files, or you can just format it again
In any case that anyone tries to comb for your old files, they will only found the mp3 files, and not your private photos or videos

But sometimes the question remains, why would anyone wants to take a photo or video of them in non-public-safe condition, anyway? I gotta go to the palm oil plantations and ask those kids.