Returning a Phone to Asurion or other Phone Insurance Company--Cell Phone Memories.... Extra Post

(This is a little extra post ... This week's post is directly underneath this one.  Check it out, please....)

Let's call it....Cell Phone Memories...

I recently cracked the glass in my cell phone accidentally.  It flew out of my hands and crashed face first on the ground. I cursed the clumsiness that has plagued me all of my life.  But, I was thrilled that I had Asurion Insurance for my phone.  They were GREAT.  I had no trouble submitting my claim and I guess I am not the only idiot that drops her phone.  I highly recommend them.  I also ordered an Otterbox this time on amazon.com.

I gladly paid the $99.00 deductible fee (because I am a clumsy but grateful idiot and I need my Galaxy S5 to live a happy life) ok...call me shallow...I don't care.

The new phone arrived the next day!  WOW!  Installation was easy with Verizon, which I have happily been with since forever.  Say forever with a Valley Girl accent, please.  :-)

I put the old phone in the envelope provided, took off the little tab with the information to track from the back sticker and was about to send it back Monday.  Last night at 1:00 in the morning, I remembered that I had some really great pictures on my phone that I had not copied to my desktop computer.  I plugged the phone in and searched for the device in "my computer" and there they were.  I downloaded them into a cell phone picture file and thought I was done.  After all, everything is in the sim card, right?  You don't send the sim card back with the broken phone in my insurance plan.

I took out the sim card to see if the actual phone contains the memories of my happy life and sure enough it did.  In fact, the more I drilled down into the phone's files, the more information I was able to see.  There were saved emails, vzpics, downloads, documents...and lo and behold some adobe documents stored that were actually some information I had sent to my bank.  Eeeek.  I erased as many personal files as I could.

I am sure that the phone is completely erased and reprogrammed when the insurance company does their reconditioning thing.  However, I was wondering what would happen if the phone were stolen from my mail box before the postal carrier got to my house.  It could happen.

So, I'm just sayin' ... if you are as paranoid about data protection as I am, this might be a new thing to think about.  I was not able to figure out how to completely reformat the phone (which would have probably been my best option) but, I plan to take it directly to the post office tomorrow and I'll be tracking that broken baby until it gets to its destination for reassignment to someone else.

I thought I would pass this information on in case anyone out there was as ignorant as I was.  I like the days of removable sd cards...Oh Well....

Have a happy day.  I will have more hints on photo restoration next week.

Renee :-)