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Thursday, August 31, 2006

Your cell may be telling on you

Judging from the e-mails I get, a lot of readers worry that giving away an old computer - even when the data is erased from the hard disk - exposes a lot of personal information to the new owner. Of course, that’s true. Simply deleting a file doesn’t do the trick.

But I’ve never heard from a reader who was worried about the data contained on a cellphone. Cellphones get sold and passed on just like computers. And, nowadays, the cellphone is just like a computer when it comes to the data stored on it. For most of us there’s a lot of our lives lurking around in the phone’s memory.

That’s why an AP story about all this caught my eye today. Security experts looked at some telephones purchased on eBay and - despite the fact that the cellphones seemed to be empty of data - there was plenty be learned. Among other things they found evidence of love affairs, secret details of business deals, text messages and passwords.

You can read about it for yourself here

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