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Old 10-21-2018, 04:26 PM   #1
Catlady
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Removing personal info from Fire tablet

I'm getting ready to trade in my 2017 Fire 8 for an Amazon gift card and a discount on a new device. I've removed photos, documents, and music. To ensure that there's no personal info left on it, is it enough to deregister the tablet and do a factory reset, or are there other steps I should take? Thanks.
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Old 10-21-2018, 04:34 PM   #2
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The factory reset wipes it clean. A deregister alone removes Amazon content, but personal data may remain.
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Old 10-21-2018, 04:50 PM   #3
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The factory reset wipes it clean. A deregister alone removes Amazon content, but personal data may remain.
Thanks!
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Old 10-21-2018, 06:37 PM   #4
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The factory reset wipes it clean.
How many hours does that take?

If not a couple, I think an expert could bring most contents back.

Completely filling the device with long documents containing random characters, before the reset, would make an forensic examination almost impossible. To make it completely impossible, you'd probably have to run the delete program on a different computer (Fire = computer) than the one whose data is being deleted off of.

My guess is that Amazon does something more extreme than the factory reset before selling as an Amazon Warehouse Deal. But if I feared someone was going to make a serious effort to see what was on my Fire before I sold it, I'd also fear that they'd know how to recover reset contents.
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Old 10-22-2018, 08:23 AM   #5
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How many hours does that take?

If not a couple, I think an expert could bring most contents back.

Completely filling the device with long documents containing random characters, before the reset, would make an forensic examination almost impossible. To make it completely impossible, you'd probably have to run the delete program on a different computer (Fire = computer) than the one whose data is being deleted off of.
If anyone is that worried about it, physical destruction is the only sure way. That's what the company I work for does with all failed and discarded hard disks. They get crushed.

For the requirements of most people who simply want to ensure that their address book is not immediately visible to the next purchaser, a factory reset is entirely adequate.
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Old 10-22-2018, 10:02 AM   #6
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also, just putting a reasonable selection of apps onto a 16Gb tablet will almost fill it, thus overwriting almost all the available storage, so there is little scope for retrieving old data. less true, obviously for a 32Gb tablet.
i found I was forever juggling apps, wiping caches etc to live within 16 Gb and that was with streaming, not storing all video and music
its not like selling a used PC with a Terabyte or more of hard drive space for someone to poke around in.
from memory, an amazon factory reset takes minutes , not hours, for 16Gb. NB about a third of that is being used for the Fire OS which does not get re-written
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Old 10-22-2018, 10:43 AM   #7
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This is a tablet I'm trading in to Amazon, not giving/selling to some computer hacker. All I want to do is be reasonably sure it doesn't still have my passwords or other personal information. I deregistered and did a factory reset, and will send it back later today. Thanks.
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Old 10-22-2018, 11:12 AM   #8
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Quote:
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also, just putting a reasonable selection of apps onto a 16Gb tablet will almost fill it, thus overwriting almost all the available storage...
This is not correct. Flash memory is difficult to overwrite. Your Fire Tablet with 16Gb of listed memory may have well over double that in the memory chip. Flash memory microcontrollers are sophisticated little parts that use wear leveling algorithms to map out used cells and map in spare cells over time.

Bottom line, it is not a simple task to wipe flash memory. Some is harder than others (e.g., SSD's). You could possibly do many many wipes and eventually get most of the wear leveling mapping overwritten. But this could also significantly diminish the memory lifespan.

If you are worried about highly sensitive data being protected from a determined hacker you need to destroy the device. Protection of minorly sensitive data from casual observation is simpler, and a factory reset may be OK - but I don't know the details of what a Fire user accessible "factory reset" does. Does it actually try to do any wipe at all, or just free up the cells for use? My assumption is that is does not do any wiping, but that is a question for the developers of the Fire tablets.
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