How to erase personal information from your Android smartphone before selling

Jamaicans and the rest of the world, you may realize that you have a crazy girlfriend if she starts poking around your Browser.

For that, you can erase your browser history on your Laptop and desktop computer by using the instructions as listed in my blog article entitled “How to save your relationship by Deleting Browser History for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Apple’s Safari”.

If you have an Android smartphone, you can erase the browser history of the various browsers as detailed in my blog article entitled “How to clear Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera Browsing history in Google Android”. 

Apple users weren’t left out; I did a browser cleaning guide for them as well as noted in my blog article entitled “How to Delete Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera browser history on an iPhone”.

 

But it's time to sell your smartphone, which still has some personal pictures, video, sound recording and files. After all, if you delete these files, they can still be recovered using the appropriate Data Recovery software as I'd explained in my MICO Wars blog article entitled “How to recover deleted Data from internal memory of an Android Smartphone or Tablet”. 

So how can you ensure that no-one, not even your girlfriend, can figure out what you've been up to on your smartphone?

Factory Reset Done Right - How to remove Factory Reset Protection for a clean sale

Clearly, the first weapon of choice for an Android user would be a Factory Reset.

You can Factory Reset the Alcatel OneTouch Pop C2 smartphone as described in my blog article entitled “How to Hard Reset the FLOW or Digicel Alcatel OneTouch Pop C2 smartphone” quite easily.

Ditto too the Huawei Y3 Series of smartphones as noted in my blog article entitled

“How to Hard Reset the FLOW or Digicel Huawei Y3 Series smartphones”.

But even these low-level Smartphone come with FRP (Factory Reset Protection). Google introduced FRP in Android 5.0 Lollipop to prevent thieves from Factory resetting stolen smartphones for easy resale.

However, if you are trying to sell a factory reset smartphone that has FRP, it'll prompt your buyer to enter the user name and password for the last Google account that was registered on the device, making it a hard phone to sell. So before you sell your Android 5.0 Lollipop smartphone, you have to disable FRP.

The procedure for Samsung and LG G5 smartphones is similar to almost every other smartphones:

1.      Go to Settings

2.      Select Lock screen and Security or just Security

3.      Select Screen lock type

4.      Choose None.

Then make sure to remove your Google account as follows:

Go to Settings

Select Accounts

Select on Google

Select Account Preferences

Select Delete your Google Account

Make sure you remove all of your Google Accounts if you have multiple Google Accounts on your smartphone. If you have a Samsung Galaxy, then you should remove your Samsung account as follows:

1.      Go to Settings

2.      Go to Lock screen and security

3.      Select Find My Mobile

4.      Enter your password

5.      Tap on your account at the top

6.      Select More

7.      Select Remove account

Once your Google and Samsung accounts have been removed, you can proceed with the factory reset.

Double Factory Reset - Making sure your smartphone data cannot be recovered

However, we still have a problem.

The data on the phone can STILL be recovered by using the appropriate Data Recovery software as I'd explained in my MICO Wars blog article entitled “How to recover deleted Data from internal memory of an Android Smartphone or Tablet”

To make absolutely sure no one can get your data, you need to do the following procedure:

1.      Do the Factory reset first

2.      Load the empty phone with junk data e.g. some old movies and large files

3.      Do a second Factory reset

This will double guarantees that your personal pictures, video, sound recording and files cannot be recovered, as anyone doing a recovery will only find the junk files!!! Sharing is caring so share this with as many of your fellow mates dodging their WAGS (Wives and Girlfriends) as you can!!!