Security researchers have warned that the “factory reset” function on Android handsets fails to properly delete data after retrieving more than a thousand photos of men and women in “various stages of undress” from second-hand phones.
According to The Independent, the study conducted by Avast used advanced data retrieval techniques to recover data from 20 second-hand smartphone purchased from eBay.
More than 40,000 photos were recovered including “more than 250 selfies of what appear to be the previous owner’s manhood”. The researchers were able to identify the previous owners of four of the 20 handsets, and described the amount of data retrieved as “astonishing”.