The iPhone is probably one of the biggest products of the past decade. It was the first phone to jump on to the smart phone bandwagon and it introduced an array of different features that were previously unknown to most. As a result, it quickly rose to the top of the industry and became a massive hit in the industry. The iPhone 4 and 4s were also major hits in the industry, and sold millions of units.

However, the iPhone 5 and the 5S were major improvements over their predecessors, featuring more powerful processors, better cameras and much more importantly, a larger screen size. Now, as is known to all, the iPhone is a pretty expensive product. Encased in premium metal and other fine products, this is a product that retails for a very expensive price. As a result, most people aren't very willing to discard their iPhones just like that. Instead, they are selling off their iPhone 4 as well as 4S in order to generate finances to buy the newer models.


Privacy Protection

The iPhone integrates quite deeply with all of your internet accounts, such as Facebook, Gmail, Outlook and various others. Most people even use PayPal and other applications on it to transfer funds, which means that the iPhone automatically keeps a lot of your information handy. Hence, before you sell off your phone, the first and foremost thing that you need to do is to make sure that you clean it up thoroughly. It is important to remove all personal photos, emails, any remaining data that might be present on the phone before you hand it over to the buyer.

If you fail to do so, people are likely to use your pictures, emails, text message numbers and even your contacts in order to harass them. Most people believe that just deleting information off their phone is enough, but it is not. Information that has been deleted off your iPhone can be recovered as long as the same clusters on the iPhone's hard drive have not been used already.

So in order to remove all related personal information, you need to do the following things in order to protect your privacy:

First, you must remove your SIM card. The SIM card can be used in your new phone and also it includes all your important contacts.

Second, you should use the 'Default Erase Setting' on your phone to clear all data. You can do so just by Settings > General > Reset > Erase all Content and Settings.

Third, as it mentioned above, The Default Erase option is designed to clear your phone completely and to make it as good as new from the inside. However, your data can still be recovered by somebody who uses sophisticated software programs. This means that you need to make use of a professional software program like PhoneClean or SafeEraser if you wish to permanently remove the data from your iPhone 4 or 4S.

Finance Burglary

People can use your account in order to steal information, make purchases and even gain access to your bank account information, creating a major compromise. The worst part is that they won't even have to insert a password, as the iPhone saves passwords automatically. Hefei Newspaper in China reported that people used Alipay linked with the lost iPhone to run out all the money about RMB 300,000 in the owner's card. So before selling your iPhone, you should erase all data and check all your bank accounts that you have ever used on your iPhone. And then disable all bank account related settings.

Selena Lee is a Senior Editor from Wondershare Software. Mrs. Lee has rich knowledge in the PC utility field. She mainly writes some useful tips on how to recover data, optimize data space, password protection, data protection and privacy protection.