Here’s a sure-fire way to compromise your identity and risk important personal data this holiday season: Lose your cell phone when you’re shopping.
Credant Technologies, which bills itself as an expert in data protection, found in a recent survey that more than 2,200 cell phones were brought to the lost-and-found departments in 15 of the nation’s busiest shopping malls this year. Some 90% of those were smartphones.
And get this: A whopping 50% of them were never claimed. What’s more, many of them were unsecured.
“No matter where we look we find that unprotected devices are being left behind,” said Sean Glynn, vice president of marketing at Credant, which tracks lost phones from a number of venues.
“People store large amounts of private data, whether personal or corporate on all of the devices they have,” he said. “You really should be sensitive about protecting that data.”
That information is a gold mine for thieves and the bounty is growing with each smartphone purchase. Already, more than a third of the 234 million Americans who own mobile devices have smartphones, according to comScore’s most recent data.
Given all the functions and the hundreds of applications available to use, the smartphone is not just a talking and texting device but a workhorse. More....Yahoo Finance
Credant Technologies, which bills itself as an expert in data protection, found in a recent survey that more than 2,200 cell phones were brought to the lost-and-found departments in 15 of the nation’s busiest shopping malls this year. Some 90% of those were smartphones.
And get this: A whopping 50% of them were never claimed. What’s more, many of them were unsecured.
“No matter where we look we find that unprotected devices are being left behind,” said Sean Glynn, vice president of marketing at Credant, which tracks lost phones from a number of venues.
“People store large amounts of private data, whether personal or corporate on all of the devices they have,” he said. “You really should be sensitive about protecting that data.”
That information is a gold mine for thieves and the bounty is growing with each smartphone purchase. Already, more than a third of the 234 million Americans who own mobile devices have smartphones, according to comScore’s most recent data.
Given all the functions and the hundreds of applications available to use, the smartphone is not just a talking and texting device but a workhorse. More....Yahoo Finance
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