Lost your gizmo? Relax, he lost his lady!

MUMBAI: Thousands of valuable mobile phones, handheld devices, laptops and USB Sticks are forgotten in taxis every day, according to a Pointsec survey conducted among taxi drivers in 11 major cities in the world.

In the last six months, Mumbaiites have forgotten 32,970 mobile phones, 349 laptops and 349 USB sticks/thumb drives at the back of licensed taxi cabs and these are just the ones that have been reported as lost.

Mumbai is not alone when it comes to forgetful travellers. The story of lost and forgotten mobiles echoes around the world with the same fate afflicting London, Sydney, Stockholm, San Francisco, Washington, Helsinki, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Oslo.

Of all the cities London emerges as the capital with the most forgetful population losing 54872 mobile phones.

In case of handheld devices such as Pocket PCs being lost, London (4,718) ranked highest once again, followed by Washington (2,260), Munich (1902) and Berlin (1125). The number of lost laptops was also highest in London (3,179) with Munich in the second place with 355 followed by Mumbai in third spot with 349.

Dude, where is my lady?

Apart from devices, some other interesting ‘items’ left behind in taxis were pork chops, babies, drunken women, judges’ wigs, machine guns and false teeth.

Pointsec conducted the survey amongst licensed taxicabs to gauge the frequency and ease with which small mobile devices are lost in transit. The objective of the survey was to encourage business and individual users to back-up, encrypt and password protect their devices in the event of it falling into wrong hands and the data being stolen, compromised or abused.

Officers and gentlemen

In Helsinki, a taxi driver found secret papers from the military forces and in London a cabbie returned a laptop belonging to an employee from the United Nations.

The driver managed to switch on the device and found out the contact details of the owner. This shows why it is important to encrypt and password protect every device and prevent less scrupulous individuals from tampering with the information.

Today, mobile phones are capable of storing 4 GB memory. That’s equivalent to physically storing data on 400 boxes of paper in nine filing cabinets with the capacity to retain four million e-mails and 4000 songs.

The space provided by these high-end mobile devices means business travellers can now use them as a mobile office and a convenient replacement for the filing cabinet to store a host of personal and business data.

This data can comprise customer and personal names and addresses, pictures, insurance details, bank account and credit card information, NI numbers, and other highly sensitive data, making it even more important to secure the data.

The survey said about 75 per cent of passengers recovered their mobile phones and 78 per cent got their Pocket PCs and Laptops back– with the cab drivers in almost all cases tracking down their owners.

© CyberMedia News