I'm willing to bet that everyone who reads this blog would agree that smart phones are the cat's pajamas, especially to anyone who geeks out about cell phones. Besides, they make you look like you're someone important (even if you're not) and who doesn't want that? However, what we all don't want is for those sweet smart phones to turn into information goldmines for those cretins who are into ID theft and according to this article from ABC news, the possibility to do so already exists.

Apparently resetting the phone doesn't delete the data on phone permanently (much like deleting information off a PC's hard drive doesn't put it beyond the reach of forensic computing devices, although the principal is the same), allowing companies like Trust Digital, which sells security products for PDAs and smart phones, to hack in an extract information. Trust Digital recently bought 10 phones on eBay for testing purposes and used "specialized yet inexpensive" software from the Internet to extract 27,000 pages of data from the phones. The moral of the story: if you're selling your phone, make sure you follow the manufacturer's instructions (which may be buried in a manual, FYI) on doing a complete wipe of the phone's flash memory.