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REAL LIFE NEWS: WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOU FIND A LOST PHONE?

by Hazed

After my bag-snatch incident a few weeks ago I am highly attuned to stories of lost or stolen phones, so this caught my eye. An experiment sponsored by Symantec examined what people do when they find a lost smartphone.

What they do, apparently, is to have a poke through the owners’ private stuff!

The researchers configured fifty smartphones with a variety of monitoring software, and then deliberately left them lying about in public locations such as food malls and public transport stops in five North American cities. The security experts could then monitor where the device was picked up, what apps were opened on it, and what info the finder looked at.

Scott Wright, the expert in question, discovered that 72% of the finders accessed an app offering access to “private pix”. 60% checked out apps that seemed to offer access to private email or social network accounts. 57% went for a “saved passwords” file and 43% snooped into an “online banking” app.

Wow. That’s a large amount of nosiness! It’s not all bad, though, because half of those who found the phones did contact the “owners” to try and return the phone.

Symantec’s Kevin Haley, reporting on the study, said that this shows that “people are naturally curious and when temptation is put in front of them they tend to bite the apple (some take many bites)”. He said that password protection on phones would prevent the casual finder from snooping on all that private data.

Well, after I bought my replacement phone, the first thing I did was enable the password on it. But after a week I took it off again because it was just too annoying to have to type something in every time I wanted to use the phone. Maybe I should think again, and put it back!

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/13/smartphone_honey_stick/print.html

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