Delete those text messages before sell your old smartphone or else

Santa Claus may be bringing you a new iPhone this Christmas, but be careful when you get rid of your old phone: All sorts of confidential information can readily be found on old cellphones purchased from eBay, Craigslist, and more.

“I’m talking about dressing up like a woman for Black Friday [for the] sympathy,” reads one text message pulled off an iPhone bought on Craigslist.

Phone numbers, email account information and potentially embarrassing details are easily found on most devices, said Lee Reiber, director of mobile forensics for AccessData.

“We see lots of sensitive information,” Reiber told FoxNews.com. To find out just how much, AccessData bought and tested five used cellphones exclusively for FoxNews.com: Two HTC Androids, an LG Android, an iPhone 3G and a Sanyo 2300 flip phone. The phones were bought on Craigslist, eBay, and from a cellphone reseller.

Reiber used Mobile Phone Examiner Plus (MPE Plus), a common forensics software tool, to dig up private, confidential information including Social Security numbers and credit card information.

In some cases, data was simply left on the phone for anyone to see. The Sanyo had an active Yahoo! account turned on, and AccessData was able to recover its username and password.

Once hackers get into an email account, they're able to uncover much more information. “That can be the springboard to get into other areas you really don’t want them in,” said Andrew Hoog, chief investigative officer at viaForensics, a digital forensics firm in Chicago.

The iPhone 3G also had its contacts in the phone. AccessData easily uncovered the geographic area each phone came from, as well.

Despite the removal of individual applications, forensic technology allows anyone to view old files still stored in the phone. In one case, this included what the owner was doing and where, thanks to the geo-location feature in the iPhone, Reiber said.

“I actually identified the reservoir in Utah where they took pictures while they were boating,” he told FoxNews.com.

To avoid giving sensitive information to your cellphone’s next owner, people need to take a few simple steps, Hoog said. Sellers need to restore the device back to factory settings -- “They are pretty much all going to have a reset setting somewhere,” he said -- and that includes pulling the activation card from the carrier.

“You shouldn't include your SIM card when you sell your device,” he added, since data is stored there as well as on the device. If the phone has an SD card, sellers should erase all of the data on that as well.

If possible, Reiber advised, run updates on the phone’s operating system to eliminate much of the data stored in the phone’s file system. EBay offers instructions to customers who visit the company's eBay Instant Sale or eBay iPhone page on how to remove data before selling a cellphone.

“Consult your owner's manual on how to back-up your phone's data safely and securely before erasing anything,” the site notes. It includes specific instructions for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android.

Reiber also advised consumers to follow similar steps when selling digital tablets -- and it’s key to follow similar (but more extensive) steps before selling a computer, of course. He recommended running a program called Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) to clear the hard drive.

And if you’re a buyer and you find the previous owner’s data still in a phone you buy, he advises to remove it quickly. “You need to go through the steps like it’s yours to get rid of that data,” Reiber told FoxNews.com. If there’s something criminal left on there, for example, it could be dangerous or incriminating for you, he said.

Just remember, keep the cross-dressing comments to yourself -- and when it’s selling time, clear the phone and cards before you drop them in the mail.

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RI reputation at stake in feud with RIM, BRTI says

The Indonesian Telecommunications Regulatory Body (BRTI) has defended the government’s dealings with BlackBerry producer RIM, saying that it was a necessary show of strength by Indonesia as a nation.

“We are squaring up against foreigners and we need to stand up. Indonesia should be respected as a big country,” BRTI member Heru Sutadi told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

In a meeting with the government on Thursday, to the dismay of Indonesian officials RIM announced that it favored Singapore over Indonesia for the location of its new server.

The government has subsequently threatened to end all BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) services in the country.

According to Heru, it was essential that a RIM server or data center was located in Indonesia in the interest of the country’s safety and security.

“If the server is not here in Indonesia, we cannot trace potential terrorism and corruption cases. We also have no idea what they are doing with data from Indonesian users,” he said.

Indonesia is the Southeast Asia’s top BlackBerry user, boasting 2.63 million users in 2010. That figure is expected to rise to 4 million users by the end of 2011.

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Study Finds How Child Abuse Changes the Brain

Children exposed to family violence show the same pattern of activity in their brains as soldiers exposed to combat, scientists said on Monday.

In a study in the journal Current Biology, researchers used brain scans to explore the impact of physical abuse or domestic violence on children's emotional development and found that exposure to it was linked to increased activity in two brain areas when children were shown pictures of angry faces.

Previous studies that scanned the brains of soldiers exposed to violent combat situations showed the same pattern of heightened activity in these two brain areas—the anterior insula and the amygdala -- which experts say are associated with detecting potential threats.

This suggests that both maltreated children and soldiers may have adapted to become "hyper-aware" of danger in their environment, the researchers said.

"Enhanced reactivity to a...threat cue such as anger may represent an adaptive response for these children in the short term, helping keep them out of danger," said Eamon McCrory of Britain's University College London, who led the study.

But he added that such responses may also be underlying neurobiological risk factor which increases the children's susceptibility to later mental illness like depression.

Depression is already a major cause of mortality, disability, and economic burden worldwide and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, it will be the second leading contributor to the global burden of disease across all ages.

Childhood maltreatment is known to be one of the most potent environmental risk factors linked to later mental health problems such as anxiety disorders and depression.

A study published in August found that found that people who suffered maltreatment as children were twice as likely as those who had normal childhoods to develop persistent and recurrent depression, and less likely to respond well or quickly to treatment for their mental illness.

McCrory said still relatively little is known about how such early adversity "gets under the skin and increases a child's later vulnerability, even into adulthood."

In the study, 43 children had their brains scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Twenty of the children who were known to have been exposed to violence at home were compared with 23 who had not experienced family violence.

The average age of the maltreated children was 12 years and they had all been referred to local social services in London.

When the children were in the scanner they were shown pictures of male and female faces showing sad, calm or angry expressions. The researchers found that those who had been exposed to violence showed increased brain activity in the anterior insula and amygdala in response to the angry faces.

"We are only now beginning to understand how child abuse influences functioning of the brain's emotional systems," McCrory said. "This research...provides our first clues as to how regions in the child's brain may adapt to early experiences of abuse."

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Facebook Prepping for Massive Hiring Spree

Facebook plans to nearly double in size in the next year.

The social network announced plans on Friday to dramatically expand its operations, adding a wealth of new engineers to enhance features and write fresh code for the website that links more than 800 million users worldwide.

"We'll be adding thousands of employees in the next year," Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg announced from the company's New York City offices on Friday. Facebook currently has about 3,000 employees in California, Sandberg said, but just 100 in its Big Apple facility -- mainly marketing staff.

The company plans to expand that Madison Avenue office by opening its first East Coast engineering office. 

And Facebook's recruitment drive is already in full swing, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

"They're accepting applications now if any of you need a job," Bloomberg told a group of reporters hastily assembled for the last-minute announcement. 

Sandberg refused to announce exactly how many employees the company would hire for the new department, however, stating only that the company would be hiring "as many qualified candidates" as possible.

The news was nevertheless pleasing not just to Bloomberg but also to New York senator Chuck Schumer, who joined Sandberg to unveil the new engineering offices.

"New York is pleased to call Facebook a friend," Schumer joked, adding that there was "so much to like about Facebook -- get it?"

The news underscores a growing high-tech trend in New York City, Bloomberg said, noting that high-tech jobs in the city have grown by 30 percent in the past year -- even outstripping tech Meccas like Silicon Valley and Boston on some metrics, he said.

"The smartest thing tech and social media companies can do is move to New York," Bloomberg said.

As proof, Bloomberg noted that the city is becoming the birthplace for more and more Internet startups, ticking off several well-known dotcoms that got their big break in the Big Apple.

"We're ... home to an increasing number of home-grown success stories, including Etsy and Hunch and Kickstarter, TheLadders, Foursquare, Gilt Groupe and Meetup," Bloomberg said 

Facebook's Friday announcement should encourage other visionaries to start in the city as well, he said.

"We want the next Facebook to start here in New York."

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