In a case of, "You get what you pay for" it looks like people who wanted to save some money purchasing some used Motorola Xoom WiFi tablets got more than they bargained for. Motorola sent out a press release on Friday that admits about 100 Xoom tablets that were returned to Motorola and then resold on Woot.com still have the personal information and content of the tablet"s previous owner.
Obviously the idea was to refurbish the tablets to be re-sold, which was supposed to include wiping the Xoom"s Android OS and putting it back in its original state. That didn"t happen with this rather large batch of tablets, which were sold on Woot.com between October and December of 2011.
Motorola"s statement says:
The information that may be accessible to the purchasers of the impacted refurbished tablets may include any information that the original user elected to store on the tablet. It is possible that users might have stored photographs and documents. They may have also stored user names and passwords for email and social media accounts, as well as other password-protected sites and applications.
The tablets themselves were returned originally by customers from a variety of retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Office Max, Radio Shack and others. Motorola says if you returned a Xoom tablet to the listed retailers between March and October 2011, you will get a free two year membership to Experian’s ProtectMyID identity protection service.