What happens to your data when you sell your phone

The number one worry about selling a phone is not the price, it is the photo library. Fair enough. Here is exactly what happens to your data, in order.

Before you post it, you erase it yourself: Settings, General, Transfer or Reset iPhone, Erase All Content and Settings. Modern iPhones encrypt everything by default, and this step destroys the encryption keys, which makes the data unrecoverable even before anything is overwritten. Your backup lives safely in iCloud or on your new phone.

When it arrives with us, we erase it again anyway, to recognised data sanitisation standards, NIST SP 800-88 and IEEE 2883, and the erasure software writes its own record against your order: that it ran, that it finished, and a reference. You can read that record in your account. We call it a record and not a certificate because the reports reach us without a digital signature, which makes them proof that the erasure finished rather than a signed attestation that it did. A phone that will not power on cannot be erased at all, so it produces no record, and we do not invent one. We assume every phone arrives full of secrets and treat it accordingly. Nobody here browses devices, and the erasure happens as part of intake testing, before the phone goes anywhere near resale.

The one thing we cannot do is remove your Apple ID for you. Find My has to be switched off by you, with your password, before you post. It is two minutes in Settings, it is in our checklist, and it is the single most common reason a payment gets delayed. Do that one step and your data story ends exactly as it should: twice erased, the second erasure recorded, nothing left behind.