I sold my android and did a factory reset.

[Android Central Question]

I sold my phone and did a factory reset, the owner knows my name and what i do, (he could have googled me) he mentioned some photos. As the phone was for work i only had whatsapp. I might have accessed email via a browser. I checked the phone and there was no SD card and when i done the factory reset it said choose your language so I thought all was well. I dont think he is up to no good but is there anything i can do? I checked and i am not signed in to google on it

 

[mustang7757]

How did you factory reset ? Through settings on the phone?

I'll leave a Link to register so you can communicate here as a guest account you can only post questions but can't reply
https://forums.androidcentral.com/showthread.php?t=409154

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Could he have looked you up on Facebook or some other social media platform?

 

[smvim]

This sounds like your Google account is apparently still linked to your old phone. You should change your Google account password, now.
Once you do, this will break access to your online Google account from that old phone. Of course, you'll also need to re-login to all your own devices and app services that auto-log into your account, but the priority is to get that old phone de-linked from your account. Go here for more details, and to remove that old phone from your Google account:
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3067630?hl=en

Just hypothesizing but doing a Factory Reset didn't remove your Google account from that old phone. When you started up that phone for the first time way back whenever, it would have prompted you to enter your Google account info. That links the phone to your Google account so all of Google's data mining and such have a specific target, and allows you to seamlessly install apps from the Play Store app and buy stuff. The issue being a Factory Reset is bit of a deceptive misnomer in that it only wipes the user data partition clean. It does not affect the installed Android operating system. So your initial account info, a part of the OS, remained since the FR only removed your stored data and files.
In the future, when getting rid of a phone, remove any microSD and SIM cards, go into the Settings >> Accounts menu and remove your account, and then do a Factory Reset.

 

[B. Diddy]

It's strange, because the language selection screen would seem to indicate that it actually went through the proper factory reset that would also remove the Google account, unless this was a significantly older phone that did things differently. Hopefully the OP will register so they can give more details, like which phone this was.

 

[bkdodger2]

If he saw the language there is no way the phone is login in to his account ….But we need more info ..where did you sell it ? And how were you paid ? You can find someone from their gmail account on Swappa for instance since it’s usually on the sellers page …and when you ship out