More and More Phones are Lost in Taxis

Businesses and individuals are being urged to use the password and encryption facilities available on the recent crop of high memory capacity mobile smartphones, in order to protect the sensitive information held on them.

This advice comes in light of a survey from Pointsec, which shows forgetful travellers have a tendency to leave their mobile devices in the back of taxis.

During the last 6 months in the nine major cities surveyed, more than 200,000 mobile phones (or an average of more than two phones per taxi), 31,469 Pocket PCs and 11,303 laptops have been left in licensed taxi cabs. These figures bring a whole new meaning to 'remote access' to personal & confidential data, as distraught owners see their prize possession disappearing into the distance. That's not forgetting the 'clocking up' of the cost of retrieving them on your personal or business time meter.

The international survey was conducted by Pointsec, experts in security for mobile devices, amongst licensed taxi drivers to gauge the frequency and ease with which small mobile devices are lost in transit and to highlight the need to secure sensitive, valuable or compromising information with encryption and access control.

A warning message to the business community and individuals to be vigilant when travelling with their mobile devices has never been more relevant, especially as more people than every before are using the latest range of "must have" mobile smartphones to store sensitive personal & business information.

Losing mobile devices is not a problem unique to London travellers, but a worldwide phenomenon. The survey has been carried out in 9 major cities around the world amongst 900 licensed taxi drivers, including London, Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Chicago and Sydney and has shown that mobile devices are forgotten universally at the back of taxis.

Londoners, however did top the charts 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 the most forgetful when it came to forgetting their mobile phones, in fact seven times more likely than the Germans, Norwegians and Swedes.

In Chicago, USA, the mobile device most likely to be left behind were Pocket PCs, with one taxi driver reporting finding 40 in his taxi in the past 6 months!

Peter Larsson, CEO of Pointsec commented "It is alarming to see that the problem of losing mobile devices has accelerated so dramatically since 2001, with more people than ever losing their mobile devices in transit."

Posted to the site on 10th February 2005