Now that smartphones come with high quality cameras in them, many of us are tempted to take private and sensitive pictures in them and regret later when they accidentally leak online. Some people capture the private moments between them and their sweethearts just for the thrill of it and later delete it to be on the safe side. But what they do not know is that files deleted from the phone are not completely erased, only their entries are removed from the file system. Anyone can recover these files using any freely available file recovery tool like Recuva in only a few minutes. Actually, when you give your phone to be repaired, some dishonest technicians run file recovery software on your phone to find out if any sensitive information can be recovered.
If you believe that you have deleted some very private files of sensitive nature, then you should securely erase any free space on your smartphone. On the Android smartphones (or tablets), wiping the free space is very easy using the free Fast Wipe app. This app can erase the free space from both the internal memory of your Android device as well as from the attached SD card. In fact, when you run this app this is what you have to choose – whether to erase free space from internal memory or from external SD card.
You also have to choose a method of erasing the free space. It supports overwriting the free space with zeroes, ones, or with random data. It does not support very complex overwriting algorithms like Gutmann or US DoD etc., basically because on a smartphone they can take a long time or hang up the system. After this you can tap on the Erase! button to start the free space wiping process.
You will be shown a progress as it securely overwrites all the free space on your SD card or internal memory. If you have too much free space (say 10 GB free space on a 16 GB SD card), then it can some time to complete the process.
You should know that overwriting the free space on your smartphone memory can actually decrease its performance and life. Therefore you should not wipe the free space very often – ideally, only when giving the phone away or before taking it to the phone repair shop.
Conclusion: The Fast Wipe app for Android can be a real life saver when you have to erase any remnants of deleted sensitive files or data from your Android smartphone. It is very quick in wiping the free space as it uses simple overwriting methods.
You can get Fast Wipe app for Android from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=himalaya.intellectio.fastwipe.