Handful of Refurbished Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi Tablets Sold with Original Owner Data

If you purchased and then returned a Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi tablet between March and October of 2011, you may want to get in touch with Motorola Mobility (and Experian) to get your complimentary two-year membership of Experian’s ProtectMyID™ Alert service.

On Friday, Motorola Mobility issued a press release stating that they’d discovered approximately 100 out of a batch of 6,200 refurbished Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi tablets were not completely wiped of the previous owner’s data before being resold on Woot.com.

The information that may be accessible to the purchasers of the impacted refurbished tablets may include any information that the original user elected to store on the tablet. It is possible that users might have stored photographs and documents. They may have also stored user names and passwords for email and social media accounts, as well as other password-protected sites and applications.

The affected Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi tablets were originally purchased from and returned to Amazon.com, Best Buy, BJ’s Wholesale, eBay, Office Max, Radio Shack, Sam’s Club or Staples – along with a few other independent retailers that were not named in the press release. The bottom line:  If you returned a Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi tablet between March and October of 2011, and you did not do a factory reset prior to returning the tablet, you will want to take precautionary steps to protect your identity.

Motorola is advising original tablet owners to contact Experian at 1-866-926-9803 to sign up for the credit monitoring service and change all of their account passwords (email, social media, etc.).

Motorola is encouraging customers who purchased a refurbished Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi tablet from Woot.com between October and December 2011 to visit the Motorola website or call Motorola Mobility Customer Support (800-734-5870) to determine whether or not their tablet is affected.

Motorola did not explain why the original owner’s data was not erased from the tablets prior to them being re-sold; however they’ve apologized for the inconvenience to customers:

Motorola sincerely regrets and apologizes for any inconvenience this situation has caused the affected customers. Motorola is committed to rigorous data protection practices in order to protect its customers, and will continue to take the necessary steps to achieve this objective.

The full press release can be seen on the Motorola website.

Motorola XOOM tablet image credit: Motorola

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