Chief’s Column: 4 steps to safely upgrading your cell phone

Many people probably received new cell phones for the holidays. If you are one of the lucky ones to receive a new and upgraded phone, there are steps you should take to protect your information and privacy. To help everyone stay safe and secure when upgrading a cell phone, the Grafton Police Department would like to provide the following information from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC.)

If you’re thinking about upgrading to a new phone, make sure you remove your personal information before you trade it in. Why? Because your phone could have a lot of sensitive, personal information on it – like your passwords, account numbers, emails, text messages, photos, and videos. If that information ends up in the wrong hands, someone could use it to wreak havoc. They could open accounts in your name, spend your money, hack into your email, or take over your social media accounts. Here’s how to remove your personal information before you trade in your phone.

Step 1. Back It Up

If you’re going to trade in your phone, the first thing you should do is back up your data.

Step 2. Remove SIM and SD Cards

If your phone has a SIM card, it may store your personal information. Remove the SIM card. If you’ll keep the same phone number, you may be able to transfer your SIM card to your new phone. But if you don’t re-use the SIM card, destroy it. If your phone has an SD memory card for storage, remove it.

Step 3. Erase Your Personal Information

Remove information from your old phone by restoring or resetting it. After you restore, or reset your phone, confirm that you erased things like your contacts, text messages, photos, videos, and browsing history.

Step 4. Disconnect Your Phone from Accounts and Devices

Before you turn in the phone, double check that it’s no longer connected to your online accounts or other devices.

• If your phone was paired to another device, like a watch or a vehicle, make sure it’s un-paired.
• Be sure to also unpair your phone with alarm/video applications and cloud-based voice assistants such as Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, Siri, etc.
• Make sure that passwords for your accounts or Wi-Fi are no longer saved on the phone.
• If you use 2-step verification or multi-factor authentication to log in to any accounts, remove your phone from the list of trusted devices.
• If you’re not keeping your phone number, change the number on file with any accounts or services that may be using it to identify you.

Anyone with questions for the Chief’s Column may submit them by mail to the Grafton Police Department, 28 Providence Road, Grafton, MA 01519. You may also email your questions or comments to chief@graftonpolice.com. Please include an appropriate subject line, as I do not open suspicious email for obvious reasons.

Normand A. Crepeau, Jr.

Chief of Police