Can someone pull my SD card and read it with their phone?

[gjlang]

With tons of people wanting to read "old" SD cards in new phones I start to suspect what's really going on here. Which brings to mind my question - Can someone pull my SD card, read it on their phone and put it back? I don't care how it's done. I just want to know if it's possible and how I can prevent it from happening. I seem to see if the card is set up as internal storage it cannot be read by another phone. Is that correct?

 

[webworkings]

Yes it is possible. Only an encrypted or encoded SD card (or a password locked one) can be taken out and put in another device, but not readable by said device. Any normally used SD card can be read by any device it can fit in.

And yes, if set up as "Internal" storage it can only be read by the device it was set to be "Internal" storage on. Now if you wipe that device (say factory or hard reset) then even that device won't read the card. None will. The data would be useless then.

 

[gjlang]

Yes it is possible. Only an encrypted or encoded SD card (or a password locked one) can be taken out and put in another device, but not readable by said device. Any normally used SD card can be read by any device it can fit in.

And yes, if set up as "Internal" storage it can only be read by the device it was set to be "Internal" storage on. Now if you wipe that device (say factory or hard reset) then even that device won't read the card. None will. The data would be useless then.

Thanks for the info. Seems to me then the best way is to password protect the card instead of setting to internal storage in case a reset is performed.

 

[webworkings]

Not a fan of making the card "Internal" myself. Way to much risk involved. Even if the phone say died, had a flaw, etc., and needed replacing, well there goes everything on the card. However many phones don't have a lot of internal storage and installing more and more apps seems to be what most do.

This is why I also suggest people not leave stuff only on the phone. Backups, always need those backups.