I want to recycle my FP3. But I won’t start, so I can’t remove the data from it, including gmail. Is sending it for recycling a security risk?
It seems insecure, because Fairphone’s recycling program requires deleting gmail, and because of what it says in the thread at ✏ How to erase your phone before you recycle . For all I know, the memory may not be damaged and then maybe can be accessed with special equipment?
But then, what is a secure way to get rid of the phone? Any clarifications and insights are welcome.
That is correct, but just a thought: I think no recycler will invest forensic efforts and energy into finding out if the Gmail account was deleted from a dead motherboard (assuming yours is). Data recovery services demand three-digit sums for such work.
The point of removing the Google account before sending it in is to enable the recycler to potentially reuse the whole phone or at least the core module as a factory reset is not possible without access to the configured Google account.
If your phone does not boot, it’s likely because of a broken core module, then nobody will be able to reuse it anyway and it’ll likely just go into e-waste recycling, destroying all data in the process.
In any case: The phone data is usually encrypted except if it’s a very old device or it was intentionally turned off. (To my knowledge FP3s should have been encrypted by default.) This means that you’d need to have the unlock code to get any data out - even if it were not broken.
Only caveat here: If you did not set any unlock code or an extremely easily guessable one, there is a risk.
As already pointed out above: Recovering data from a phone that does not boot is extremely costly and it is unlikely for anyone to do that on an old phone in recycling.
So if you don’t have top-secret data on this device, I think it’s uncritical to have it recycled as-is.
