Losing your smartphone sucks at best. There is always the issue of maybe having paid an arm and a leg for it. Then there are your phone numbers, messages, photos, videos, and whatever else may be stored on the phone. If you think about it, this data can be even more valuable than the actual price of the phone.
If Symantec‘s recent study is anything to go by, we all ought to be more worried about that hidden cost of losing a smartphone.
What the renowned security firm did was to “lose” 50 smartphones – quotation marks to emphasize the fact that they did it on purpose. The smartphones were left in places with lots of human traffic – bus stops, malls, and other similar locations.
Of course, Symantec made sure that they had a means to monitor the smartphones after they got stolen. The project was called Smartphone Honey Stick Project.
On a positive note, half of stolen smartphones were returned to the owners. I don’t know about you, but where I live, it seems that you can say goodbye to your phone and everything in it once you forget it at a bar.
On the downside, even those phones that were returned showed signs of being tampered with. The smartphones were installed with software that showed the activity done on the units. For example, a high number of the lost smartphones showed that applications that potentially contain sensitive information (such as bank account information) were almost always accessed.
Care to make a guess as to how high the numbers are? How about 96 percent of the phones?
Losing your smartphone may be the last thing on your mind, but these things do happen. The moral of the story? Make use of at least one security feature to make it more difficult to access sensitive information. I know I will be doing that now.
Image via Geek How Tos