Let’s say you had been hearing lots of talk about Android tablets last year, and decided to pick one up. Then later, maybe you noticed some hardware problem, or the tablet just wasn’t behaving correctly; for whatever reason, you decided to return the tablet. You’re well within the warranty period, so everything’s fine, right? Well, it might not be for a few Motorola customers who bought, and then returned a Xoom tablet last spring or summer. Motorola’s just revealed that its refurbishment process skipped a couple steps on a few Xooms, and shipped them out to new customers with all their old data still intact.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that Motorola reports that this issue only affects about 100 Xooms, all the WiFi-only versions. If you returned yours to a retail store between March and October of last year, there’s a chance your tablet’s data never got wiped. Once otherwise-refurbished, these Xooms where then resold online at woot.com near the end of last year.

If you’re worried your personal data might have been revealed to a stranger, what can you do about it? It sounds like Motorola isn’t even sure just which Xooms didn’t get wiped, so it’s covering its bases by offering two free years of ID fraud monitoring to anyone who returned their Xoom to certain retailers during the affected period. Check the source link for full details.

We imagine at least a few of these affected Xooms failed in such a way that their owners were unable to manually wipe their data before returning them. For everybody else, though, let this be a lesson: if you want to make sure something gets done, do it yourself.

Source: Motorola