As of 2026, factory reset does not reliably erase all personal data from electronic devices, and significant amounts of recoverable personal information remain on many second-hand devices sold or recycled worldwide.

Caveats

• Modern smartphones with default full-disk encryption (Android 6+ and iOS) destroy encryption keys during factory reset, making residual data cryptographically inaccessible in most practical scenarios — a significant mitigation the claim does not acknowledge.
• Key statistics about recoverable data on second-hand devices (e.g., the widely cited 35% figure) originate from a 2015 study and may not reflect the 2026 encrypted-device landscape.
• The claim's broad scope ('electronic devices') spans highly variable categories — phones, hard drives, USB sticks, IoT devices — with very different reset reliability, making any single generalization inherently imprecise.