Motorola: refurb tablets shipped with former owners' data intact
Whoops
Motorola Mobility has admitted that some refurbished Xoom tablets were sent out to their new owners with previous users' data still present in the gadgets' memory banks.
The company, which is waiting for a thumbs-up from the Feds before it can be swallowed by Google, offered its profuse apologies for the snafu.
Some 6200 Android-based Motorola Xoom tablets were sold through US website Woot between October and December 2011. Out of that number, around 100 went out without being fully erased, Motorola confessed on Friday.
The company said it was offering former Xoom owners a free two-year membership of a local service offering protection against identity theft just in case any of the un-zapped info provides access to secure data.
Change your passwords, Xoom owners who sent their kit back are warned.
And if you plan to return kit - any kit - or sell it on, always do factory reset before you do so, we say.
Meanwhile, worried Xoom owners can contact Motorola through its Xoom Returns website to see if they are among those affected. ®
COMMENTS
Broken device?
C'mon Doug, be reasonable.
If a device goes back under warranty it could well be because it's _broken_ in which case the previous owner couldn't erase his/her data.
At this point you would like to think that the people responsible for repair and refurb care just a little bit about doing the right thing.
So if it is effectively bricked how are you going to clear off the data? you can't smash it as you'll not get a replacement.
Motorola negligence
1. Buy product
2. Install rootkit/keylogger/trojan
3. Return product
4. ???
5. Profit!
Does not compute...
Xoom goes to factor for repairs. Gets refurbed. Doesn't get factory reset?
Even if it ends up there because of a defect or damage preventing the USER from doing a factory reset, manufacturers should have a means of zapping or removing compromise-capable chips.
Lamentably, anonymizing one's device is no longer as simple as yanking the hard drive. Even then, some mfrs demand the "non-defective" or "non-failed" drive be returned with the hardware -- even if one claims the disk is not at issue and already has proprietary data and is in use in another machine awaiting return of the repaired original.
Data still recoverable
Unless they change the flash chips the data is probably still there and easily recoverable for those who have a bit of tech know how. It's actually a lot harder to erase data from flash chips than hard disks.
