Can you hard reset a galaxy S5 without using its screen?

[MegX351]

I have a Samsung Galaxy S5, I dropped it & the screen is now completely black. There is one 'C' shaped crack which upon speaking to Telstra advised the LED screen is damaged & will cost too much to repair, I now have a new S5. I have removed all of my photos, video, music & documents from the old phone memory & removed my SD card....is there any way I can hard reset it before I send my damaged phone back to Telstra? I am concerned about privacy issues, my email, Ebay, Facebook accounts are all open... I can still finger scan & the phone responds, so that I can get into the phone memory when connected to the computer but that's it, I can't see anything on the screen at all. H E L P!!

 

[Rukbat]

First, the first thing a firm like Telstra would do is replace the screen, then wipe the phone. Larger companies do this as standard policy so that if they're sued for stealing data, they can show that company policy makes that impossible. (And most of them would be the ones to call the police if they found an employee trying to copy data from a customer's phone. Just to have something to back up their claim about their company policy.)

I've worked with customers' sensitive data (in the US, there's a federal law about medical information, and in one job I had access to thousands of patients' data), and couldn't remember the data I had been working on 10 minutes after I worked on it. I looked at it, made changes to it, made sure it was correct (a postal zone for one city, while the patient lived in another city, for instance - I'd correct the error), but forgot it as soon as I looked at the next record. (I probably could have gotten very wealthy selling some of that data, but I had a job to do and I did it - and stealing data wasn't part of it.) Most people who work with data are the same - there's too much to do, if you want to keep getting paid, to waste time looking at someone else's emails.

Second, you can (turn off the new phone first) try to use your Samsung account or Google account (Android Device Manager) to wipe the phone remotely.

 

[MegX351]

Cool,
Yeah I figured that a big company like Telstra wouldn't care about my accounts, I'll give Device Manager another go, had a look at it earlier.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, appreciate it.
Cheers!