Sorry Boss, I Lost It
Sorry Boss, I Lost It
Month Date, 2006: Ever left your wallet in the back of your cab? How about your phone, your PDA, your laptop, your USB key? And just how do you explain it to your colleagues the next day?
You’re not alone. In the last 6 months 314 of us left laptops in the back of Sydney cabs. A further 440 left PDAs and pocket PCs, while 63 USB keys were left on the backseat. A lot of these devices may have been reclaimed but for those that weren’t, that’s a multitude of potentially sensitive corporate data left on the street.
These figures are also only provide an indication of the missing devices found and reported by Sydney Taxis. Many more could well have been left on the backseat and picked up by the next passenger, picked up and not reported by the driver or worse, fallen from the seat to the gutter.
The results come from Pointsec, who undertook worldwide research in to the taxis of 11 major cities regarding the amount of laptops, mobile phones, PDAs and USB keys left in the back of taxis by passengers.
Further to this study, Pointsec, a provider of encryption software for mobile data protection, says 60 percent of information theft results from lost of stolen equipment and only 25 percent from network intrusion.
Globally the survey covered 2000 licensed taxi drivers from eleven major cities across the world. The good new for forgetful passengers is that if you’re going to forget your mobile phone, a taxi is a good place to leave it. Globally, an average of 75 percent of Taxi customers are reunited with their forgotten phones.
But don’t loose your laptop in a San Francisco cab. Only 32 percent those who lost laptops in the American city saw their devices again, a far stretch from the 97 percent reunited with their computers in London.
Londoners might be more likely to see their devices again compare to other cities but they are also more likely to forget them in the first place. 3,179 laptops were left on the backseat of cabs over the six month period, alongside 923 USB sticks and a staggering 54,874 mobile phones. Once again, these are just the forgotten items that are actually reported.
But moving on from electronic device, what were some of the more interesting finds from the cabbies surveyed? For one Helsinki tax drive, it was a bundle of secret papers from the military forces – unfortunately the documents could not simply self-destruct and their was not encryption or password to protect them. Other interesting finds included a machine gun, 100,000 pounds worth of diamonds and a drunken women left as a tip by her boyfriend.