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'Honey Stick' Project Tracks Fate of Lost Smartphones
wiredmikey writes with a quote from an article at Secury Week: "In order to get a look at what happens when a smartphone is lost, Symantec conducted an experiment, called the Honey Stick Project, where 50 fully-charged mobile devices were loaded with fake personal and corporate data and then dropped in publicly accessible spots in five different cities ...Tracking showed that 96-percent of the devices were accessed once found (PDF), and 70-percent of them were accessed for personal and business related applications and information. Less than half of the people who located the intentionally lost devices attempted to locate the owner. Interestingly enough, only two phones were left unaccounted for; the others were all found."
I won't care about the contents, would wipe the phone clean, and change the IMEI, then it's a brand new phone for me. (most likely what happened to the 2 unaccounted for)
Just out of curiousity, how many of these phones were able to actually send/receive calls, and (most importantly) -- did they have a phone book entry titled "Mom". Because whenever I find a lost phone, that's the number I call. People are generally honest -- contrary to what this study suggests. If the number is that low, it's probably something wrong with the methodology; ie, a cell phone left at a restaurant has a lot higher chance of making it back to its owner than being left sitting at a bus station. A test like this should try to accurately reproduce where someone would leave their phone, otherwise the stats gathered aren't very interesting.
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A couple of months ago whilst visiting Calgary I found a new looking pink Blackberry bold on the street. The phone was fully charged and locked. With a lock it was impossible to contact the owner as I couldn't access the phone to try calling a contact. I just waited and the next day the phone rang. I explained I had found the phone etc and the owner's company sent a courier to pick it up. I was a little disappointed that at no point did anyone thank me for picking up the phone and waiting in for the courier but ah well the phone got back home. The thing is though it made me realise that the only thing the lock on the phone did was prevent me from calling a contact on the phone. If I had wanted to keep it I would have done as a poster above commented and wipe the phone clean. I suppose some phones have sensitive information on them but for the rest of us do we need to lock them if all it does is stop honest people from trying to return them to the rightful owner?
A group of us were out on Saturday night, and while walking along the seaside (at Redcliffe, QLD, Australia) found a Blackberry on a park bench. There was no password, no contacts labelled in anything that looked like a home number, and all names had expletives in them. Rather than try to find who the owner was (battery nearly dead) we dropped it off at the nearest Police station.
Random thought: It could have been the business phone of an escort. You wouldn't expect to find a home number. And a lot of times the contacts are used to store the phone numbers of creeps they don't want to hear from again, hence the expletives.
About 10 years ago I was driving along a gravel road in rural Minnesota and spotted a phone in the road.
During the first few hours I made a point of answering this phone so that I could get the word out that
the owner's phone had been lost. Almost without exception the people who called refused to believe that
I wasn't the owner of the phone playing some trick on them. Then I was accused of stealing the phone
and later of wanting money for its return. Seriously, I was verbally attacked by these morons for simply
trying to arrange a place for its return. Eventually I told one of these people which gas station I was leaving
it at, and simply left it there with a confused cashier. The whole experience was surreal; I felt like I had been
sucked into this person's life. It would make a good movie plot I think. Needless to say when I see an apparently
lost phone now, I just ignore it and walk away.
Character is what you do when no one will see.
One time, I found a cell phone in a dorm lounge. I was there watching my show and was planning to leave the phone in place in case the owner came looking for it. The phone began to ring incessantly, and eventually I answered in case the owner was calling to search for the phone.
Before I could say more than, "Hello", the owner started chewing me out as a despicable cell phone thief.
I didn't appreciate this sort of mistreatment. What to do? Well, I am not a thief, so naturally I decided to do the right thing.
I took the phone and dropped it down the nearby elevator shaft, then resumed watching my show. This was in 2003, so perhaps the phone has been returned to its irate owner by now. Or perhaps it shattered when it hit the base of the shaft three stories down. Either way, I feel happy I chose the righteous path and ignored any temptation to follow baser instincts.
I was in a cab with a bunch of drunk people about six years ago, when a phone came up out of the seat we were all asked, "Is this your phone?" Turned out that it didn't belong to any of us. I had never found a lost phone before, but I was sober, and I was also pretty sure I could locate its owner, and as I lived in the area code corresponding to the device's number, would have the easiest time returning it. I took the phone home with me.
I called a few entries in the contact list, most notably, "Mom." Got voicemail, left a message explaining what had happened. "Mom" never called back. I ended up chatting with two different women though by going through the recent calls list and calling some numbers. I came out of that ordeal with two different stories---apparently the guy who used the phone was either a player or a womanizer, I'm not really sure which. The problem I had was that I wasn't sure who the right party to return this phone to was, exactly. So I had an idea...
The phone was tattooed with Verizon logos (I sure as hell don't miss those days... that LG UI that got ported to EVERY PHONE THEY SOLD was so fucking awful), so I called 611 with the phone itself. After explaining the situation to a customer service rep, she very regrettably informed me that even though she had the information right in front of her on her screen, she would not tell me the name of the account holder. Go figure. So I wrack my brain trying to think of ideas when I got a pretty good one.
I asked her, "Can you make three way calls?"
"No, but I can put you on hold and make another call," she replied.
"Okay, take down this phone number," and I give her the number of the woman I most suspect that I should return the phone to. "Now put me on hold and call her, and then can you tell me whether or not that person is the owner of this phone?"
"Oh yes!" she says. "Just wait on hold."
Ten minutes later...
"That person IS the owner of this phone. You can return the phone to her and you'll be all set!"
So I call her one more time and gave her my address, and a car pulled up an hour or two later. The funny thing was that the person who came to the door to pick up the phone wasn't actually the woman I spoke with though... it was her boyfriend, the guy who actually used the phone, and also bore a striking resemblance to the fellow that took all those self-shot photos in the camera roll, modestly covering his junk while staring at a mirror.
A more positive ID might have been possible, but camera phones had such atrocious low-light performance back then....
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He is likely a Sociopath, incapable of empathizing with others, caring only about his own feelings. While we associate that with serial killers, and indeed all serial killers are, a surprising amount of the population is like that, about 10%. They cannot feel empathy as we do, they can't put themselves in the shoes of another person. All that matters to them is their happiness. So they are the kind of people who will do something to someone and not think twice, but if the same thing is done to them they will get extremely angry. They cannot see that it is the same, to them it is completely different because only their feelings matter.
A few weeks ago I was passing through the Seattle airport with my family. I found an iPad 2 on the shuttle train between terminals - basically brand new with only the very barest of info on it. We were running behind, so I stuck it in my pack and boarded the plane. Once appropriately airborne, I pulled it out and tracked down the email address of the owner (good thing they use Facebook - I don't). My 4.5 year old son asked me what I was doing and I replied; "We're going to give this back to the people who lost it." Which we did as soon as we got home.
We don't own an iPad and my kids, I'm sure, would love to have one. But teaching my kids to do the right thing - because it's the right thing to do - is far, far more important than a piece of electronica. And if it was my phone, or his Star Wars lunch box - we'd want it back.
Recently I had an extra laptop. I had the idea (but didn't execute on it) to go to coffee shops with it, with tracking software installed in the background. I would then leave the laptop frequently while "going to the bathroom". Eventually in theory the laptop would be stolen, I would be able to trace it, track the person down, call the authorities and get it back. One less laptop thief running around (or at least unknown to police) and a fun time. Unfortunately, I didn't follow through on it.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
The nature of the fake user data may have influenced the results. If I thought I had the phone of some some MBA tool I would hand it to a bum. If it looked like someone nice I would go out of my way to help it on its way home.
Also if some guy found the phone of what seemed to be a hot chick he might tend to be more chivalrous.
For real phones the worst case scenario for the phone would be if it were a politician's. That phone's data would be on the net in two seconds.
Since it did happen, it appears he lives in the real world. The real question though, is what world is it that you live in?
Perhaps GP lives in a more civilized/honest part of the world than GGP. Thus his experience suggests and his expectation is that the vast majority of people are honest.
I dropped my passport once in Tampere (EU passport, possibly worth a bit to a sleazeball), and got it back by asking at some shops I had been in earlier. It had apparently been found on the ground outside and been handed in to the shopkeeper. Where I work (Kuopio, about 400 people in the office, and lots of visitors), it is unheard-of for things to be taken without permission, and people leave stuff lying around quite often. If a wallet is left on a desk in an open-plan area, it will still be there the next day. A high-end laptop can be left anywhere at a customer's factory in the Nordic countries, and it will still be there when you return. On the other hand, if we visit the U.K. or the U.S., we're supposed to secure any laptop with a locking cable if we leave it for even a few minutes; and that's company policy.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire