Most households have a drawer like it: a couple of retired phones, an old laptop, maybe a tablet, and every one of them still logged into something. Mobile Muster, the industry take-back scheme run by the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association, has said for years that most Australians have at least one old phone sitting unused at home rather than sold, donated or recycled. The reason isn’t laziness. It’s that nobody wants to be the person who sells a laptop and accidentally hands over their tax file number along with it.
Here’s the thing though: learning to wipe an old phone or laptop properly is not hard. It takes an afternoon, most of it waiting for a progress bar. The steps matter more than the time they take, and skipping even one of them is how old devices end up leaking old photos, saved passwords or banking logins to whoever buys them next.
Why deleting files isn’t enough
Hitting delete, or dragging something to the bin and emptying it, doesn’t actually destroy the data. It just removes the file’s “address” from the index the device uses to find things. The content itself sits on the storage chip until something else happens to overwrite it, which could be days or could be never if the device is switched off and sold the next morning.
This is true on both phones and laptops, though the practical risk differs. A modern phone with encryption switched on (most iPhones and Android phones have this on by default now) is reasonably safe even if someone pulls data off the raw storage, because without the encryption key it’s scrambled nonsense. An old laptop running a plain hard drive, particularly one bought before around 2015, often has no encryption at all unless you turned it on yourself. That’s the device we’d worry about first.
The factory reset is the floor, not the finish line
A factory reset wipes the operating system back to its out-of-box state, including app data, accounts, photos and settings. On a phone or tablet it’s genuinely effective, provided you do it properly and in the right order. On a laptop, especially an older Windows machine, it’s a reasonable starting point but we wouldn’t treat it as the whole job.
For phones, the order matters more than people expect:
- Back up anything you want to keep, photos, contacts, app data, before you touch the reset button.
- Sign out of iCloud (on iPhone) or your Google account (on Android) before resetting, not after. Apple’s Activation Lock and Google’s Factory Reset Protection are anti-theft features that will lock the next owner out of a device entirely if the previous owner’s account is still attached when it resets. We’ve seen perfectly good phones become unsellable bricks because of this one step being skipped.
- Remove the SIM card and any microSD card, then run the factory reset from Settings, not by holding buttons and hoping.
For laptops, Windows 11 (and Windows 10, for the time being) has a “Reset this PC” option under Settings that offers to fully remove everything and clean the drive, not just reinstall Windows over the top. Choose that option, even though it takes longer. Mac owners should use the “Erase All Content and Settings” feature in System Settings on a reasonably recent macOS, which is built specifically for handing a Mac on to someone else.
Why we wouldn’t bother with drive-wiping software for most people
There’s a cottage industry of apps that promise to “securely erase” your drive by overwriting it multiple times with random data, built on old US Department of Defense standards from the days of spinning hard disks. Our honestly slightly contrarian take: for the vast majority of Australians selling a normal phone or a laptop bought in the last six or seven years, this is overkill and not worth the time.
Modern phones and most modern laptops use solid-state storage (SSD or similar flash memory) that’s encrypted by default. Once you factory reset the device and the encryption key is destroyed, the old data is unreadable rubbish even if someone extracts the raw chip. Multi-pass overwriting was designed for old mechanical hard drives where data could theoretically be recovered with specialist lab equipment after a simple format. That risk is far smaller now, and for a device going to a mainstream trade-in programme or a casual Facebook Marketplace sale, a proper factory reset plus encryption is genuinely enough. We’d save the extra software for a business disposing of drives that held sensitive client records, not a family upgrading phones.
Accounts and logins, the bit people forget
A factory reset clears local data but it won’t automatically undo everything you’ve connected the device to over the years. Before you reset, work through a short mental checklist. Sign out of your Apple ID or Google account properly, as mentioned above. Remove the device from “trusted devices” or “linked devices” lists in your banking apps, Netflix, and anywhere you use two-factor authentication codes sent to that handset. If the phone was your authenticator for logging into email or super accounts, set up that two-factor method on a different device first, or you could lock yourself out of your own accounts, not just the buyer out of theirs.
We’d also suggest checking whether you’ve set up a VPN or any security software with a licence tied to the device, since some of those need manual deactivation before the device changes hands or you’ll waste a paid subscription slot on a phone you no longer own.
What to do with the SIM and eSIM
Physical SIM cards are easy, just take them out. eSIMs are the bit that trips people up, because there’s no physical card to remove and reset doesn’t always clear them properly on every handset. Go into the phone’s settings and manually delete the eSIM profile before you reset, and separately contact your telco, whether that’s Telstra, Optus, TPG or a smaller provider, to confirm the number has been transferred or the eSIM deactivated on their end. This matters doubly if you’re moving to a new phone yourself, since leaving an old eSIM active can occasionally cause call and text delivery issues on the new one.
Selling, donating or recycling: what actually happens next
Once a device is properly wiped, what you do with it matters for different reasons.
Selling privately or trading in through a telco or retailer programme gets you the best financial return, typically. A phone that’s two or three years old and in good physical condition can still be worth a genuinely useful amount, we’ve written before about the maths on phone repair or replace decisions and the same logic applies to resale value versus buying new.
Donating works well for devices too old to have much resale value but still functional. Several charities and community programmes refurbish old phones and laptops for people who can’t afford new ones, and this is honestly the option we think more people should consider before defaulting to recycling, since a working device helping someone else is a better outcome than melting it down for parts.
Recycling is for anything broken beyond repair or so old it’s not safely usable, think devices with swollen batteries or cracked screens leaking glass. Mobile Muster has free recycling drop-off points at participating retailers around the country, and most council e-waste collection points will take laptops and desktops as well. Several states now have e-waste bans that prohibit putting this stuff in kerbside bins at all, Victoria’s landfill ban on e-waste being one of the better-known examples, so check your local council’s rules before you bin anything with a battery or circuit board in it.
The laptop-specific traps worth knowing
Laptops carry a few risks phones don’t. Software licences are one: Microsoft Office, antivirus subscriptions and some creative software are tied to an account rather than the machine, so deactivate or transfer the licence before wiping, or you may lose access on your next device. Windows activation itself usually travels with a Microsoft account these days rather than being locked to hardware, but it pays to check you’re signed into the right account before reset.
The other trap is BIOS or firmware passwords left switched on from a workplace device, which can make a laptop unusable for a new owner even after a clean wipe. If the laptop came from an employer, get IT to remove any mobile device management profile before it leaves the building, this is a genuinely common reason secondhand work laptops end up basically worthless on the resale market.
And a practical one for anyone still running an ageing Windows 10 machine: Microsoft’s free support for Windows 10 ended in October 2025, with the consumer Extended Security Updates programme now the main way to keep getting security patches, currently running through to October 2027 according to Microsoft’s own ESU page. If you’re clearing out an old Windows 10 laptop to sell, be upfront with the buyer about which update situation it’s in, since that affects what it’s reasonably worth. If you’re weighing up whether the laptop is even worth keeping going, our notes on the end of an old Windows version are a reminder of how this cycle tends to play out.
The privacy angle, and what the regulators actually say
This isn’t just about avoiding embarrassment if someone finds old photos. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner treats old devices as a genuine source of identity theft risk, since a phone or laptop often holds enough personal information, old emails, saved logins, scanned documents, to help someone build a convincing impersonation. Scamwatch, run by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, regularly flags identity theft as one of the costlier scam categories reported by Australians, which is part of why we think the “just factory reset it and don’t overthink it” approach still needs that one extra step of properly signing out of accounts first.
If you’re clearing devices for an ageing parent or helping set boundaries around a teenager’s old phone before it’s handed down within the family, it’s also worth a quick look at how account logins and social media age restriction rules interact with hand-me-down devices, since a reset phone that still has an old social account signed in defeats the purpose of a fresh start for whoever inherits it.
How to wipe an old phone or laptop: don’t overthink it, don’t underdo it
The realistic failure mode for most Australians isn’t some sophisticated data recovery attack on a sold laptop. It’s forgetting to sign out of iCloud, leaving a banking app logged in, or tossing a phone in a drawer because the whole process feels more technical than it is. A factory reset done in the right order, with accounts properly removed first, covers almost everyone’s actual risk. Save the industrial-grade wiping software for businesses and anyone handling genuinely sensitive records, not your mum’s five-year-old iPad.
Do it this afternoon rather than putting the device back in the drawer “for later”. Later is how six phones end up in one kitchen drawer, all of them worth something, none of them doing anyone any good.
— Em Castellano, Security Writer, Tech Geek
Featured image: AI-generated illustration.
