Good Practices When Disposing of or Selling a Device
How to erase your information before handing over your phone
When you change phones, whether to sell, give away or dispose of the old one, it's easy to focus on transferring data to the new device and forget that the old one still stores photos, saved passwords and active sessions for your accounts. A poorly done factory reset, or simply deleting the visible files, doesn't always erase information irrecoverably, especially if the device wasn't encrypted beforehand. The right process starts with backing up whatever you want to keep, signing out of all accounts and unlinking the device from services such as Find My iPhone or your Google account, so the new owner isn't locked out and you're no longer associated with the device. After that, a factory reset on an already encrypted phone leaves the data practically unrecoverable, which is exactly why enabling encryption from day one makes this moment much easier when it finally comes.