What to do:
Perform a “Factory Reset” on mobile devices before selling or giving them away. Notebooks and PC’s should be disposed off after the hard drive has been low level formatted, or has some holes drilled into them, or both.
Why do it?
There have been cases of compromising personal information being recovered from disposed devices – anything from names, addresses, banking information and collections of inappropriate content. Mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads and Androids give their owners the facility of performing a factory default reset which deletes all content puts the device into the same configuration as when it left the factory.
PC’s may not have this same facility available. If you can perform a low level format (to get rid of the old data) and do a system restore before giving it away, that is great. Otherwise, the easy way is to pull the hard drive out of the box and drill some holes in it. A sledgehammer would also work and is very therapeutic.