Amazon Echo Dots Store a Wealth of Data--Even After a Reset

Like most Internet-of-things devices these days, Amazon's Echo Dot gives users a way to perform a factory reset so that, as the corporate behemoth says, users can "remove any ... personal content from the applicable device(s)" before selling or discarding them. But researchers have recently found that the digital bits that remain on these reset devices can be reassembled to retrieve a wealth of sensitive data, including passwords, locations, authentication tokens, and other things. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. Most IoT devices, the Echo Dot included, use NAND-based flash memory to store data.