I have an Android phone that has logged in my account of a certain website (through their apps), my experience is that they will BAN one of the accounts almost instantly if I log in another account with the same device (I forget if the earlier or later account will be banned but one of them must be banned). The problem is here, I'd like to sell this phone to another because it is still worth some money and I don't need the phone, the site is quite popular here locally so many people have their accounts. What can I do to refresh my device so that my account is safe in case he logs in the same service? If it's just impossible I'll just break the phone because the account is more valuable
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What can I do to "refresh" my device?
- Thread starter louis2008
- Start date
Hi Louis,
If you're going to sell your device, you don't want anything of yours left on it. After backing up your personal data to a computer or other device, go to Settings -- accounts and begin removing all your online accounts. The last one you will want to remove is your Google account, but remove everything. Then go to Settings -- General Management -- Factory data reset. This will delete ALL user data and set the phone to out-of-the-box state.
It's important for you to log out of your Google account before resetting and selling it: if you don't FRP (Factory Reset Protection) will prevent the new owner from logging in with anything other than your credentials. Then go to Google.com and remove the device from your account. All done!
If you're going to sell your device, you don't want anything of yours left on it. After backing up your personal data to a computer or other device, go to Settings -- accounts and begin removing all your online accounts. The last one you will want to remove is your Google account, but remove everything. Then go to Settings -- General Management -- Factory data reset. This will delete ALL user data and set the phone to out-of-the-box state.
It's important for you to log out of your Google account before resetting and selling it: if you don't FRP (Factory Reset Protection) will prevent the new owner from logging in with anything other than your credentials. Then go to Google.com and remove the device from your account. All done!
I think to give a definite answer I'd need to know how the website is identifying the phone. If it's through information stored on the phone, e.g. through the app ID (since you say you are using this app) or cookies stored on the device then wiping the phone as described above should remove any risk of it being associated with your account.
The only remaining risk I can see would be if their app has access to phone hardware identifiers (such as the IMEI) and the app used those. From Android 10 onwards a non-privileged (i.e. user-installed) app should not have access to the IMEI anyway, so such a check would be increasingly useless to them, and of course I'd hope that no reputable app would try to do this anyway (the reason this was changed was the privacy implications of apps collecting such data), but not knowing which app it is it's impossible for us to say for sure. Of course it also follows that if they did something like that they'd also know that you were now accessing the site though a different device once you log in through your new phone, so they'd have to be particularly dumb to terminate users if an old device subsequently showed up with a different account. Overall I therefore think that the risk is low, provided you wipe the device properly before selling (which you should always do anyway, as a matter of simple data protection).
The only remaining risk I can see would be if their app has access to phone hardware identifiers (such as the IMEI) and the app used those. From Android 10 onwards a non-privileged (i.e. user-installed) app should not have access to the IMEI anyway, so such a check would be increasingly useless to them, and of course I'd hope that no reputable app would try to do this anyway (the reason this was changed was the privacy implications of apps collecting such data), but not knowing which app it is it's impossible for us to say for sure. Of course it also follows that if they did something like that they'd also know that you were now accessing the site though a different device once you log in through your new phone, so they'd have to be particularly dumb to terminate users if an old device subsequently showed up with a different account. Overall I therefore think that the risk is low, provided you wipe the device properly before selling (which you should always do anyway, as a matter of simple data protection).
You can always let the admin of the website, app or whatever know that you are getting a new device and will not be using the old one. If they know to expect that, I can't think of any reason why they would terminate your account. No one is expected to keep the same phone forever.