Thinking of selling your Droid Incredible? If you’re a mob-boss, peruser of the freaky-deaky, or someone who visits websites with sensitive data on their handset, you might want to hold off.
Turns out, the Droid Incredible is snapping shots of the sites you visit for use with the built-in Bookmarks widget. That, in itself, isn’t a big deal; there are a dozen traces of every website you visit on just about any device, mobile or not. The unfortunate part is just how hard it is to get rid of these ones.
“What’s the big deal?” you say. “Just do a factory reset!”
Yep – that would generally work. Unfortunately.. that’s not the case here. Dump your history? They stick around. Factory reset? They stick around. As a reader at BGR has discovered, the only way to get rid of these itty bitty snapshots in time is to go in and manually delete them, requiring both a knowledge of their existence and a pinch of technical know-how.
This could be a lot worse, of course; it’s not like HTC is sending these screenshots off to some secret agency, and this is almost certainly something that can be fixed in an OTA update. Think of it as not being able to wipe the history in your browser, and treat your device accordingly until a fix comes around. You don’t really want the person buying your phone to know about your Hello Kitty “fan-art” fascination, do you?
Eris does this too.
Actually, I believe this is just part of the HTC Sense UI. I have the CDMA Hero is it does the same thing. I am willing to bet any of the phones running Sense UI will do this, even their new baby the EVO.
or just go ahead and tap “format SD card” while you’re doing “factory reset”, which if you’re selling or giving away the phone, you don’t want the SD card to have anything on it regardless. The phone stores most data on the SD or in the cloud, not much is reset by the factory reset, almost no data.
Can be fixed by deleting the folder .bookmark_thumb1 and create an empty txt file .bookmark_thumb1 , no more thumbails…
http://www.mobilesmods.com/2010/06/17/pour-les-paranos-du-sense-thumb/ (French news)
These sites are blowing this way out of proportion. This is not an “oops”, this one legitimately is a feature. The reason it is saving it is so when you open the browser, you see pictures on your tabs. And because it is saving to the SD card, of course a hard reset doesn’t get rid of it! If it did, you would lose all your pictures, songs, videos etc on there too. Should you be given the option of where to have it save to? Yes. But this is not a crisis. And besides, it is only your bookmarks. If you are going to stuff you dont want others to know about, you probably arent bookmarking them.
This is unfortunate circumstance of reading New York Post