Refurbished Moto Xoom tablets being sold with previous owners' data

A small number of refurbished Motorola Xoom tablets sold on flash sale site Woot.com late last year might still contain data from the devices' previous owners, Motorola Mobility said.

The Libertyville-based company said about 100 out of 6,200 refurbished Xoom Wi-Fi tablets were potentially affected. Woot.com sold the devices between October and December, Motorola Mobility said in a statement. The old data that could be accessed by new owners may include photos, documents and user names and passwords for e-mail and social media accounts.

To protect consumers whose tablets might have been resold on Woot.com, Motorola Mobility said it is providing a free two-year membership to an Experian credit monitoring service to people who purchased and returned a Xoom Wi-Fi tablet to Amazon.com, Best Buy, BJ's Wholesale, eBay, Office Max, Radio Shack, Sam's Club or Staples between March and October 2011. The company is recommending that original owners change their passwords to e-mail accounts and social media sites. Previous owners that performed a factory data reset on their tablet before returning the device should be safe.

Motorola Mobility said it is 'actively pursuing the return of the impacted refurbished units.' Consumers that bought a Xoom from Woot.com between October and December 2011 can also visit motorola.com/xoomreturn or call customer support at 1-800-734-5870.

'Motorola has confirmed that any refurbished units sold outside the time period in question were properly refurbished,' the company said.

Motorola Mobility has struggled to get the Xoom to catch on with consumers. It sold 1 million tablets in 2011. Apple, which dominates the tablet market, sold 15.4 million iPads in the fourth quarter of 2011 alone.