If you have a phone or a computer, you have a digital footprint.
When it comes time for an upgrade, how much of your information ends up out there is up to you.
NBC2 News Today anchor Lisa Spooner decided to find out how to make sure your digital information stays protected. So he went to Midtown Pawn & Jewelry in Fort Myers to buy some personal electronics. She wanted to see just how well the devices had been wiped of personal information from previous owners and how easy it would be to get private details off of them.
" Well, I mean it's, it's different for cell phones than laptops and stuff. Okay. I mean the end process is the same," said Rob Suci, the owner of the store. "We wipe out all the data you know. But to take the stuff in is a little bit different process. and specifically for laptops, for Apple laptops, they're a little more difficult to wipe clean. And the people that come in and buy them are a little bit more tech savvy than your normal people."
Lisa ended up buying a laptop, a Chromebook, and an older iPad.
"Do you think it's, possible to for someone to buy an electronic and for something to not be wiped properly and to end up with personal information from previous owners," asked Lisa.
"It's possible. Yeah. If the store was lazy and didn't want to wipe it clean, then yeah, that's possible for sure," said Suci.
We made sure that they were wiped of any information that would be readily accessible. But then I took it to the experts at CPR Tools. This is what they do for a living.
"Foundationally, if you have a data storage device, whether it's a phone or laptop or an iPad or some sort of tablet, and you can't access what's on the data storage device, you call us and you come in and we help you out with that," said Ray Leventhal, the general manager at CPR Tools. His company not only works with individuals trying to recover people's data. He also does work on occasion for the government and has the highest level of government security clearance you can get.
"We were involved in a study with one of the government agencies not so long ago, and the grand majority of devices that were purchased aftermarket did, in fact, have personally identifiable information or PII on them. It was it was very unnerving to see that people did not understand what was truly of their personal information was out in the wind at that point. We found things like directions to people's houses from a pharmacy that was delivering medication, just amazing amounts of personal information," explained Leventhal.
And Leventhal says what's even scarier is that you don't have to be a professional to get the information you want or need off used devices. "I would say. You wouldn't have to be a hacker, just a fairly savvy user. And there are a lot of those around," he said.
So we left our pawn shop purchases with Leventhal and his crew for a few days to see what they could find on them. A week later, we returned to CPR Tools to hear what they uncovered.
Leventhal explained, "We subjected all the equipment to, a thorough examination, some with software and some that we could not the software. The tablet was a good example of a proper factory reset. Apple devices, on the whole, are pretty good. A factory reset will completely overwrite the storage when you do that."
So, they weren't able to pull anything off the iPad. But what about the laptop?
"We did open the device to see if there was any removable media that we could examine with some of our forensic tools. There was not. So what we did was the next best thing. We have some proprietary software that we were able to boot this device to a thumb drive and have that thumb drive this operating system thoroughly examine what was on the disk, both in the file system and outside the file system, and what we found was some artifact data, portion of a JPEG image, part of a text file," said Leventhal.
But again, nothing that was too concerning or that they could piece together to find out who the previous owner was.
The Chromebook was similar to the laptop but Leventhal says they're usually better with factory resets.
So what if you do need to sell your personal device to someone else? How do you make sure your data and personal information doesn't end up in the hands of someone who would use it against you?
Leventhal added, "Don't take for granted that your data is safe until you find out that it truly is. There are lots of places where you can get your drive wiped. Any number of folks, you know to look up how to eradicate data, and you'll come up with the right methods to ensure your data is safe. But again, you have to know what your data is and how valuable it is if you don't want to take those extra steps."