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Can I safely throw away old smartphones? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been cleaning up my home office and found 2 pretty old smartphones in a box, around 10 years old I'd say. I don't have any old chargers to check if they still work so I'm unsure what sort of data is on there, if any, or if they still charge up even.

What are the chances I can safely dispose of them at a recycling center, without risk of anyone trying to check into the phone? None of them can have the battery removed so I don't want to just smash them with a hammer.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

It's not something I worry about. Electronics recycling centers get so many old devices that I'm sure that mine are just lost in the mix. Even when I drop them off at my city's recycling yards, they're sending old electronics off by the shipping container-load. It gets shredded, or otherwise destructively disassembled for materials, not for components.

The possibility that anybody would bother to try to extract the memory from my old phone for forensic recovery of the encrypted data is so remote as to be non-existent. Data recovery companies charge a lot of money for the service, because it takes expensive, specialized equipment. What would somebody hope to get by doing it for random, old phones? I mean, if it's dick pics they want, plenty of guys would be happy to send them voluntarily.