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Jodie1987

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 5, 2016
208
30
Hey,

I sold my iphone 6 and left my sim card in it, before I sold the phone i did like 7 factory resets of the phone, will the person who bought the phone be able to see my old contacts or people I have messaged?
 
Lol. No they won't be able to see your old text, they can use the phone to text or call under your number if the sim is still active with carrier, but if not then it's just a dead sim with no info.
thanks for your answer :)
 
is that a no they wont be able to see my old texts, or a no they will be able to see my old texts
SIM cards do not hold contact information, personal data, or anything else other than your phone number.

You wiped your phone 7 times. That's where your data was.

Otherwise it'd be referred to as wiping your SIM, or something like that or some process would be universally known to wipe your SIM before selling or getting rid of a device.
 
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SIM cards do not hold contact information, personal data, or anything else other than your phone number.

You wiped your phone 7 times. That's where your data was.

Otherwise it'd be referred to as wiping your SIM, or something like that or some process would be universally known to wipe your SIM before selling or getting rid of a device.
While the iPhone does not allow you to copy your contacts onto SIM card almost every other phone does and you can hold contacts on a SIM card. For the purposes of the OP question you are correct but as a general statement not so.
 
Why would you even wipe the phone 7 times?
Paranoia about privacy.

Or being thorough.

Depending on your perspective.
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While the iPhone does not allow you to copy your contacts onto SIM card almost every other phone does and you can hold contacts on a SIM card. For the purposes of the OP question you are correct but as a general statement not so.
Yes, thank you for that.

I knew that of course, but in the context of OPs question it's true as you indicate.
 
Enable SIM passcode is what I would advise. Means even if someone say got access to your phone they would not be able to use your sim without the passcode.
 
While the iPhone does not allow you to copy your contacts onto SIM card almost every other phone does and you can hold contacts on a SIM card. For the purposes of the OP question you are correct but as a general statement not so.
I saw an option to import contacts from SIM on my iPhone, so why do they do that but not let you transfer contacts to the SIM?
 
Wouldn't a single 'Erase All Content and Settings' leave no traces? 7 times reminds me of an erase option that I saw once in Disk Utility. :p
 
Wouldn't a single 'Erase All Content and Settings' leave no traces? 7 times reminds me of an erase option that I saw once in Disk Utility. :p
The erase multiple times (from disk utility) is from the old magnetic hard drive times, where
1) You did a quick format and it only deletes the file table from disk (so the files were still on the hard disk)
2) Even if you erased the hard drive with zeroes once, you could magnetically see the difference between a zero overwritten with a 1 and a zero overwritten with a 0.

So with those it made sense. With solid state it's absolutely worthless, as all data is (usually) encrypted, and when you format, it just deletes the encryption key - not wiping the data (but the data becomes useless without the encryption key).

So even if you erase the phone multiple times, you would just erase the encryption key, leaving the encrypted data in the same state even if you do it a 100 times.
 
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