Daily question: In the back seat?
Thu, Sep 25, 08
In the last six months alone, 31,544 mobile phones in New York and 55,843 in London were left behind in taxi cabs, says a new survey by Credant Technologies.
Now to be sure, Credant is a security software vendor with interest and this survey was done on 300 licensed taxi drivers each in NYC and London, but still, that’s a pretty shocking number if true.
Other things were also left in the back seat:
The research also found drivers discovered other strange objects in the back of their cabs, including a sawn-off shotgun, 12 dead pheasants, two dogs, toilet seats, a casket of funeral ashes and £2,700 in cash.
But mobile devices can contain sensitive personal and corporate data, as BBC indicates:
A survey by credit reference agency Equifax in April suggested 16% of its customers put PIN numbers on their mobile devices while 24% recorded birthday dates.
It wouldn’t be a wild guess then to extrapolate from this survey that perhaps a million mobile phones are annually left in taxi cabs all over the world.
How likely is it then that the West will embrace the mobile-phone-as-wallet concept?
