Layer 8 has moved! Same great taste, but in a fresh new blog application. Left-behind laptops

January 25, 2005

If you lost your laptop in London, chances are you left it in the cab.

At least that's the case according to TAXI magazine, which polled 900 cabbies across the globe on what gets left behind in the back seat.

In the past six months in London, 63,135 mobile phones, 5,838 PDAs and 4,973 laptops were unintentionally abandoned. That works out to an average of three phones per cab. In Chicago, passengers are more likely to leave their PDA. One cabbie reported finding 40 over the past six months. Hope they were encrypted...

Which segues nicely to poll sponsor and mobile security company Pointsec, which says given the amount of sensitive information held on mobile devices these days, losing them can be costly in more ways than one.

Luckily for the absent-minded, cabbies seem to be an honest lot. According to the poll, 80% of passengers got their cell phones back and 96% were reunited with their PDAs and laptops - "with the cab drivers in almost all cases tracking down their owners."

Via The Register

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