5 ms·

I'm not an expert in digital footprint-hiding, but it's probably a good idea to replace / remove the SIM card as well. A factory reset will leave data laying ar

• palmotea 8mo ago
  Or just buy a cheap point-and-shoot, and stick a giant SD card in it: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=abcat0401001&id=pcat17071&qp=currentprice_facet%3DPrice%7E%2475+-+%2499.99%5Ecurrentprice_facet%3DPrice%7E%24150+-+%24199.99%5Ecurrentprice_facet%3DPrice%7E%24100+-+%24149.99&st=categoryid%24abcat0401001 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=... That's seems like an all-around better option than trying to make an old phone work like a point-and-shoot camera.
• Krutonium 8mo ago
  On any modern phone, your phones user partition is encrypted with a key that is itself encrypted by a key stored in the CPU. When you factory reset, what's happening is basically the key in the CPU is deleted, then re-created. At that point the data on your partition is random noise, so a new encryption key is derived and used to format the partition. Even better, modern Android then encrypted your personal data with yet another layer based on your password/key/pattern you use to unlock your device. Many layers. Retrieving that data would be incredibly hard even for a nation state unless the encryption used was deliberately backdoored, and even then once the device TRIM's the space (which it likely does prior to formatting) that data is gone on a hardware level. (TL;DR Can't move the memory chip to a new device, and even if you backdoor the OS you still need the users password)