If you own a PDA or a smart phone you are probably storing sensitive information on them. Did you ever wonder how safe those information are?

Personal banking records, corporate notes on sales activity and product plans are among the sensitive data found on PDAs (personal digital assistants) and smart phones. These data can be very easily used if you are not careful.

There are two ways the data can be stolen from you. You can lose the gadget or you can give the information without knowing it.

The first situation it’s very frequent. You can forget you device on a table, on your car’s rooftop, in the restroom, etc.

To help you not forget your device, Synchronia, a UK-based software developer, released a new product called Mobile Manager, which includes the capability to remotely lock a device, wipe the data from it, and emit the “scream.” The scream is actually a screech that will help you if someone wants to steal your device because smart phones are especially high-risk targets for theft, as they may contain sensitive corporate data.

According to Synchronia, it takes an average of 30 seconds for someone to notice that their phone is missing. It is hoped that the “scream” function will be activated while the phone is still within earshot - though the mechanism to trigger the alarm would have to be activated within that time frame.

Giving the information without knowing is kind of simple. Let’s say that you want to sell your smart phones. You erase the data but not for good.

“Personal and corporate data is being sold on the open market through eBay, and it’s also available to anyone who finds, steals or purchases a used smart phone or PDA from any other source,” Nick Magliato, chief executive of Trust Digital, said in a statement. “The general public needs to immediately be made aware of this fact.”

In a test made by Trust Digital, they bought 10 devices from eBay and managed to retrieve nearly 27,000 pages of sensitive data.

The users of these devices included the corporate counsel of a multibillion-dollar technology company that serves the legal market, a former employee of a publicly traded security software company, and an employee of a Web services company.

The sensitive data was gleaned from the flash memory of the gadgets, because the users failed to “hard” wipe their devices, according to Trust Digital.

This means giving the information for free. Palm Treo 650s and BlackBerry handhelds from Research In Motion have a built-in hard wipe function. Use it before you sell your smart phone. If you don’t have such a feature, contact a third-party company to do the job for you.