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.
