How to Keep Your Personal Information Safe When Selling an iPhone
Texts.
Pictures.
Passwords.
Credit cards.
Bank accounts.
Our lives are stored on our cell phones. It started off simply, first with voicemail messages and then with texts. Over the last ten years, the personal information that is kept on our cell phones has exploded to include everything from our treasured family pictures to our stock trading figures. We trade the convenience of having it all right at our fingertips for the risk of having the data compromised.
When you’re selling an iPhone, you want to make sure that you’re keeping the personal information that you’ve filled it with safe from others. Whether it’s the texts from your partner that are incredibly private or the bank account information that could lead a criminal to hacking into your account. Luckily, you aren’t alone and there are ways today that you can keep your personal data safe.
Here are some simple, step-by-step instructions for clearing iPhone data when you’re ready to go about selling an iPhone.
You don’t want to lose your data in the process of wiping it from a device that you’re ready to part with. Verify that you’ve got an up-to-date backup of your iPhone. If your phone is plugged in and connected to wifi overnight, then iCloud automatically does this. You’ll still want to do a manual backup before selling an iPhone.
The process of backing up your data might take a few minutes. It’s worth the wait to be patient. You can be confident that Apple will capture everything, and then you’ll have the option to put all of that right into your new device.
There’s also the option of plugging your phone into a computer and backing it up manually with iTunes. This is a little more time consuming, but your data can be saved onto the hard drive of your computer instead of in the cloud this way. All you have to do is to plug it into your computer and follow the instructions through iTunes.
iOS devices all use hardware encryption to keep your data safe. To prevent anyone from getting to your data, all you have to do is leave it locked. The encryption key will keep it protected and the phone locked. If you’re selling an iPhone, you’ll need to leave the phone unlocked so the device is usable for someone else, and that means erasing all of the data.
Here’s how you erase your data so that you’ve got a clean device for the buyer.
This will restore your phone to factory settings, and every bit of that personal information will be gone. Congratulations! You’ve got a clear phone for whoever you’re selling or giving it to, and you can now restore your data to a new device.