Motorola Mobility has admitted that some refurbished Xoom tablets were sent out to their new owners with previous users' data still present in the gadgets' memory banks. The company, which is waiting for a thumbs-up from the Feds before it can be swallowed by Google, offered its profuse apologies for the snafu. Some 6200 …

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Monday 6th February 2012 10:19 GMT Anonymous Coward

Factory re-set or even better....

... a bucket of salty water.

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1. Monday 6th February 2012 11:07 GMT LarsG
  
  salty water?
  
  Did that to an N95, but it still refused to die!
  
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Monday 6th February 2012 10:23 GMT Doug Glass

So some morons left their personal data on the device when they got rid of it. This is news? Seems to me the idiots of the world have been doing this for a long time.

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1. Monday 6th February 2012 10:40 GMT Anonymous Cowbard
  
  Broken device?
  
  C'mon Doug, be reasonable.
  
  If a device goes back under warranty it could well be because it's _broken_ in which case the previous owner couldn't erase his/her data.
  
  At this point you would like to think that the people responsible for repair and refurb care just a little bit about doing the right thing.
  
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2. Monday 6th February 2012 10:50 GMT Anonymous John
  
  With their personal porn stashes sometimes.
  
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3. Monday 6th February 2012 11:30 GMT Giles Jones
  
  So if it is effectively bricked how are you going to clear off the data? you can't smash it as you'll not get a replacement.
  
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Monday 6th February 2012 10:47 GMT Raumkraut

Motorola negligence

1. Buy product

2. Install rootkit/keylogger/trojan

3. Return product

4. ???

5. Profit!

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Monday 6th February 2012 22:13 GMT Dick Emery

Data still recoverable

Unless they change the flash chips the data is probably still there and easily recoverable for those who have a bit of tech know how. It's actually a lot harder to erase data from flash chips than hard disks.

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Tuesday 7th February 2012 17:58 GMT dssf

Does not compute...

Xoom goes to factor for repairs. Gets refurbed. Doesn't get factory reset?

Even if it ends up there because of a defect or damage preventing the USER from doing a factory reset, manufacturers should have a means of zapping or removing compromise-capable chips.

Lamentably, anonymizing one's device is no longer as simple as yanking the hard drive. Even then, some mfrs demand the "non-defective" or "non-failed" drive be returned with the hardware -- even if one claims the disk is not at issue and already has proprietary data and is in use in another machine awaiting return of the repaired original.

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