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London (pte025/25.01.2005/12:30) - Thousands of mobile phones, PDAs and laptops are forgotten in taxis everyday, according to a new survey. As the British IT portal The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk reports, the international survey of 900 taxi drivers shows that many passengers are leaving potentially sensitive information at risk because they fail to use password and encryption facilities on mobile devices. The survey in London was conducted by TAXI, the magazine for the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association magazine, and sponsored by Pointsec, a mobile security company.
In the past six months in London, 63,135 mobile phones (an average of three hones per taxi), 5,838 PDAs and 4,973 laptops have been left in licensed taxis. Taxi drivers from Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Chicago and Sydney also took part in the study, which revealed wide international differences. Londoners left over double the number of laptops in the back of taxis in comparison to other cities. In Chicago, PDAs were the mobile device most likely to be found, with one taxi driver reporting finding 40 in his taxi in the last six months. Danish people were the most forgetful about their mobile phones, leaving seven times as many in the back of taxis as Germans or Swedes.
"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. In fact, mobile users are in a worse position now, because they are far more reliant on using their mobile devices to store massive amounts of sensitive information, with very few concerned about backing it up or protecting it," said Magnus Ahlberg, the managing director of Pointsec.
According to the survey, an average of 80 per cent were reunited with their phones and 96 per cent with their PDAs and laptops, proving that taxi drivers are in general very honest. However, only 46 per cent of people bothered to reclaim their phones in Australia, and only 18 per cent were reunited with their laptops. Both London and Munich taxi drivers cited a lot of sex aids as the strangest items they'd found in their taxis, while taxis everywhere found a large number of forgotten condoms.
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