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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."
Best way to get a phone back. LOUD annoying ringtone.
Loose that sucker. Call it and call it and call it...
Eventually "come get your freeking phone it is ringing off the hook with this stupid song"...
Has worked 3 times so far :)
Stealing is stealing. Finders keepers is a poor excuse for a total lack of character.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Isn't this just a big ploy by Symantec to now sell you some "phone security" program that will A) not work and B) make your phone really slow?
If you were truly a "good" citizen you would have dropped the BlackBerry off in the nearest trash can.
Stealing is stealing. Finders keepers is a poor excuse for a total lack of character.
The term "stealing" sure has changed a lot lately. I thought is was actively depriving someone of wanted property. So "copying" is not "stealing." Claiming discarded items is not "stealing." Hitting you over the head and taking it out of your pocket is "stealing." That said, I would try and find the owner to give back the phone. And not doing so is kinda shitty, but it ain't "stealing."
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?
Should you ever lose your phone, expect the same thing to happen to you.
He does. He thinks that is normal. He thinks most people are like that. Can you imaging how much it sucks to live in his world?
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.
And your reply is testimony to the "kinda shitty" attitudes with our modern society. Character is what you do when no one will ever know what you did. You and he have none. I would love to reply under my login, but evidently replies like this keep my karma level in the basement.
Claiming a lost item is "discarded" is some pretty funny "thinkspeak", don't you think?
I'd suggest you look up what can be considered theft and then re-evaluate your statement.
I cannot speak of the 49 other states in the US, but I'm familiar with the statutes of CA -- and I can tell you that it *IS* stealing. Shall I waste my time looking up the exact statutes or will you just accept you are wrong?
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.
As far as returning the phone, there has to be someway to get data to return the phone.This involves one of two things. First is waiting for the person to call the phone and hope the person who answers is intent on returning it,or going through the address book and calling people so the phone can be returned. The later was how I got my Razr back when I lost it on the Texas A&M campus. So rummaging though the phone, as some people did, can either be considered snooping or data gathering to try to return the phone. Accessing email may be to send an email say the phone was found, or trying to steal email. The motive is ambiguous, though the scare mongering obvious. If I found a lost phone, I would expect a call on it pretty promptly asking for it back. The lack of such a call would mean that something else was going on.
In fact the only thing that is clear is that if you lose a phone, there is at least 50% chance that no effort will be made to return it. From the data It seems about half the finders did what any competent thief would do. Remove the sim card, go to the nearest public computer and wipe the phone. The real race when losing a phone is getting a lock before this happens.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Is it hard to accept that we do NOT have a moral right to act like a dick?
Well, technically, it would be larceny here in the states. In other words, "borrowing" without intent to give back to the owner.
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.
That sounds quite plausible. But I'm curious, how did you come about this information?
No, he's just annoyed at the legalistic interpretation of moral judgements.
If I find $10 on the side of the road (and can't see who dropped it), I'm going to pocket it. Finders keepers. Technically, it's a crime, but it's not (IMO) wrong.
If it's traceable (i.e. a wallet, phone) I'll make a reasonable effort to trace the owner, or hand it over to the police.
To me, it depends on whether the owner is likely to get it back anyway. It's reasonable to assume that dropped money is never coming back. It's reasonable to assume that a dropped wallet will be picked up by someone who will make an effort to return it, or found by the owner (who's going to be looking). The police might not make a distinction, but I do. Sometimes the law (or what people assume the law is) can be "wrong". That's his point.
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.
Hypothetically speaking, because I would try to contact the owner and return it, in a real situation, but...
If I were going to steal a cell phone, the first thing I would do is pull the battery. The second thing I would do is factory reset it, either by reflashing it from a computer, or from within the phone if it's not locked. The third thing I would do is change the IMEI.
All of the above are ridiculously easy (well, pulling the battery from an iPhone isn't), and would leave me with a phone that can't be located by you, and which can't be burned by the carrier because it has a different IMEI. Sell it as "off the back of a truck" for a few hundred, and you're done. Rinse. Repeat.
And if it's a GSM phone, there's no "bringing it in to get activated". Buy a SIM. Put it in. Hey look, it's activated!
I live in a world where most people who find the phone would try and give it back. In my world, people like that are the exception, not the rule.
Claiming discarded items is not "stealing."
Much as I see where you're coming from; actually it is under the law. Lost property remains the property of the original owner, they don't give up ownership to anyone that finds it - just as your house remains yours when you leave in the morning, so your phone remains yours if you leave it on a bench. There are means to legally acquire abandoned property though - adverse possession for example.
So if you were to notify the owner that you have their property, and they can't be bothered to collect it, after a period of time it legally becomes yours. You can also hand it into the police, and again, after a period of time of non-collection they may return it to the finder to keep (in the UK; a friend of mine when we were kids handed in a found £50 note, and got it back a few months later when it was unclaimed).
This is why if you unknowingly buy a stolen car, and the owner finds out and claims it back - via reporting it to the police - you get stiffed. The person that sold you the car had no legal right of ownership to transfer, so you own bupkiss, and the original owner gets to claim it back.
Of course, in practise physical possession is 9/10's of the law, especially for small objects that are hard to track down once mislaid. But picking up a dropped/mislaid item and keeping it, is in fact, stealing - you're intentionally depriving someone else of their property, even if you don't know who that someone is. Best choice is to hand the item into a responsible person where you found it; the barman or shopkeeper for example, as it is fairly likely the owner will attempt to find it via them. Alternatively, hand it into the police with details of where you found it. Keeping it and attempting to return it directly is of course an option, but you might get accused of stealing it in the first place! Leaving it exactly where it was is also an option often forgotten - the owner may well come back for it in a minute.
Personally, I've returned a fair few items ( though mostly to someone who's literally just dropped it or left it), but including a lady's purse that had all her things that she left in a supermarket trolley, via the shop-keeper. They contacted me later to say that she was extremely happy and surprised to get it all back untouched - apparently there was her pension in there, and she'd expected that at least to go missing. On the other hand, I've had a dropped camera disappear in the 5 minutes it took to come back for it; a wallet that wasn't mine popped back through my letterbox (turned out to be a neighbours); and my dropped wallet returned by a guy walking behind me. A friend of mine also got his laptop back that he left in a taxi; the taxi driver tracked him down and dropped it off personally.
So you never know; there are a lot more honest people out there than you'd think.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Advere possession only applies if the owner knows (or should know) you have it, but doesn't care. So if you find a mobile phone and tell the owner that you've got it, and they never turn up to claim it, after a while it becomes yours. Same goes for land; if you occupy it (by for example, building your fence over part of their land), and they allow it without some specific contract lease or something, then eventually it becomes yours - after 10 years, I think.
Picking something up, keeping it and telling nobody, does not qualify under adverse possession.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
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.
You might want to look at the "Abandoned Property" statutes. Those are the ones that say if you leave a car in my yard, after a while I can keep it.
Yes, but, you generality are required to make a good faith effort to locate the owner within a certain time frame (check your local listings, Your mileage may very, open to residents of the continental United States only).
Someone leaves an item at your home. You go, "it's mine now bitch". Original Owner comes to reclaim item within the prescribed time frame. If you don't return it, you are committing a crime.
You post the item in Craigslist lost & found on a regular basis until the time frame has elapsed and the OO comes to claim it a day late, "Suck it, it's mine now bitch."
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
Ditto. I left my phone on the roof of my car at a rest area. Came back looking for it an hour later and it had gone. No answer on the phone. Got a call from a mobile phone shop the next day to say that someone had handed it in to them - due to the carrier splash screen. They couriered it to me because I had only been in the city for the day, and had returned home.The best part about it was that I was no longer with that carrier, which they would have known when they looked up my address.
Nice things do happen, and as houstonbofh said, it is the rule rather than the exception in most places.
While it may be classified as stealing by law, morally it's fine.
Only if you consider stealing to be morally acceptable.
Shame morality and the law never seem to match.
They do, in this case.
If you find a valuable item which is likely someone else's lost or misplaced property, you're supposed to bring it to a lost property office or to a police station. If it remains unclaimed after some time, it becomes yours. I have done exactly this a couple of times, and in both cases the original owner claimed the property. Clearly, it had been misplaced, not discarded. In one case, the person who reclaimed a wallet which had no identifying material (no credit cards, driving license, etc.) gave a couple of pounds to me as a reward, which was delivered anonymously via the police.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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
I found a phone once while on travel. I opened it up and called the number listed as "Home".
The person who answered accused me of stealing his phone.
I told him fuck off and that I was throwing his phone in the garbage.
Then I had a change of heart and left the phone with the front desk of my hotel, texted "Mom" where the phone was and that her son is an ass.