In this booming economy, you might find it to be a great time to buy a new car due to the low interest rates and great incentives that dealers are offering to new customers. When you buy a new car, you’ll probably be selling your old car, but one thing that is often overlooked is the information that your old vehicle has about you. If this information is not deleted, it can get into the wrong hands and used against you.
Newer vehicles have technology systems that can track your location, store your home address, and even keep connections to your mobile devices. We recommend that before you bring your old car to the dealership to sell, you take a few precautionary steps to prevent any type of personal data from getting into the wrong hands.
The first step is to do what vehicle manufactures call a “factory reset”. Steps to perform a factory reset are available in your car’s owner’s manual. If you don’t have access to the owner’s manual, you can always call your local dealership to walk you through the steps. Doing a factory reset will delete most of your information, which is a good thing here.
After you’ve done a factory reset, take a look at the navigation on your vehicle. Are there any places that are still saved in the car’s memory? Vehicles’ navigation systems often save information about where you live and where you work to make it easy to navigate, but it would be a very scary situation if the next buyer knew exactly where you worked and live. Make sure this information is no longer saved in the vehicle’s system.
Next, cancel your subscriptions that you have associated with that vehicle, like your satellite radio subscription. You don’t want to continue to pay for someone else to listen to the radio, do you?
And lastly, make sure the programmable garage door opener in your vehicle can no longer open the door to your home. Imagine what kind of nightmare it would be if missing this simple step could lead to someone having full access to your home.
Your taking precautionary steps like the above suggestions before you sell your vehicle can help to prevent unsafe and undesired situations.
The bottom line is that there’s really no better time than the present to become a LibertyID member for identity theft restoration protection. LibertyID provides expert, full service, fully managed identity theft restoration to individuals, couples, extended families* and businesses. LibertyID has a 100% success rate in resolving all forms of identity fraud on behalf of our subscribers.
*Extended families – primary individual, their spouse/partner, both sets of parents (including those that have been deceased for up to a year), and all children under the age of 25