Previous owners’ data found on 100 Motorola Xoom tablets sold online

Motorola’s Xoom may have been a pioneer in the Honeycomb tablet market but failed to make a big enough dent that left an impression. The company recently decided to sell the Xoom, well refurbished devices anyway, online at discounted prices. A total of about 6,200 Xoom tablets went up for sale through Woot.com. While the prices may have been a been a good bargain for new owners looking to invest in an Android tablet, it proved be slightly distressful for the devices’ previous owners.

Out of the 6200 odd that were on sale around 100 of them that were sold still seemed to have previous owners’ data. Although the exact details were not revealed, it is quite possible that it could have included highly personal and sensitive information such as photos, videos, email messages, passwords, chat logs, banking details and so on.

SOLD! But not Factory Reset

Motorola has admitted this and apologized for the inconvenience caused to the customers. The company said “Motorola is committed to rigorous data protection practices in order to protect its customers, and will continue to take the necessary steps to achieve this objective.”

Motorola would like to get back the 100 affected tablets sold between October and December 2011. To reduce the risk, the company is offering two years of Experian ProtectMyID Alert to those who returned the tablet anywhere between the period.

This mishap is a warning to those who return or sell their smartphones and tablets to dealers or anyone else. A simple thing to do before exchanging or reselling your handset/tablet etc. is to make sure you perform a factory data reset which erases all the sensitive information on the device and clears up the internal memory. If you’re giving away your memory card along with the device, make sure you format it and double-check to see if it’s empty. You could be in great risk should your personal data get into the wrong hands. This is something that you should keep in kind mind irrespective of the operating system, but do make sure to back up your data either on the cloud or a recommended PC suite.