Businesses are being urged to use the password and encryption
facilities available on the recent crop of high memory capacity
mobile smartphones to protect the data in the event of leaving the
devices in the back of a cab.
In the last six months in London, 63,135 mobile phones, 5,838
PDAs and 4,973 laptops have been left in the city's 24,000 licensed
cabs. British cabbies also found a harp, a throne, £100,000 worth
of diamonds, 37 milk bottles, a dog, a hamster, a suitcase from the
fraud squad, and a baby.
In the past three and half years since the survey was first
carried out there has been a sharp increase in the number of
powerful, executive-focused mobile devices being forgotten in
London taxis with 71% more laptops and 350% more PDAs being left
than in 2001, which in the wrong hands could cause the owner and
their company enormous damage.
The survey in London was conducted by TAXI, published by the
Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, and mobile security experts
Pointsec.
Many smartphones now have a standard memory capacity of 80 MB –
enabling users to store 6,000 word documents, 720,000 emails,
360,000 contact details or a staggering 7,200 pictures. Such
storage capacity makes losing your phone much more than
inconvenient: a thief could gain access to every detail of your
personal life and compromise the security of your employer's
network and give access to a company's commercial data.
According to the Home Office, identity theft is now the fastest
growing crime and costs the UK in excess of £1.3 billion a
year.
While Londoners topped the global chart when it came to forgetting
their laptops, with more than double the number of laptops being
left in the back of London taxis compared with other cities, the
Danes were worst for losing their mobiles, and Americans worst for
losing their PDAs. One Chicago driver found 40 in his tax in the
last six months.
Magnus Ahlberg, MD of Pointsec, said: "My advice to any mobile
worker is to talk to their IT department about taking
responsibility for security, this way your back is covered if you
do lose your mobile device. Legislation is slowly becoming more
specific in this arena and there is a good chance we will soon see
legal action taken against individuals and organisations that do
not protect information that they store on other people."
The good news in the survey was that an average of 80% of
passengers were reunited with their mobile phones and 96% with
their PDAs and laptops – with the cab drivers in almost all cases
tracking down their owners.
