Special care must be taken when recycling or disposing of an Android device, especially if it is not encrypted, as a factory reset will not securely erase the phone memory. Any SD card that is in the device must be removed and securely erased on a computer; the card can then either be kept or put back into the device. It would be advantageous to find a recycling partner who could certify the sanitization of the device memory or continue holding on to the phone as a backup device. There is not currently a method recommended by Google to securely erase an Android phone. If the device is encrypted a factory reset should destroy the key that would be necessary to decrypt the data but performing a factory reset on a non-encrypted phone is similar to deleting a file from a computer, unless it is securely deleted or written over by another file the data will remain.