Laptops Lost? Or is it Like Cars Stolen from the Queens Plaza Mall?

Back in the day (yes, I am old enough to use that phrase now), if you wanted to get rid of your junker car and claim a little sumthin' sumthin' from the Good Hands People, you dropped your car off at the Queens Plaza Shopping Mall in the morning and called the cops a few hours later. It seems that the QP parking lot had the highest rate of auto theft in the nation, and the cops wouldn't even bother to go out and check to see if your car was actually gone. You just went to the local precinct and spend a few minutes with the harried guy in the blue uniform, walked out with a report clutched in your hot little hand and that was that. Within a few hours, your car was actually gone - without a trace - probably into one of the illegal chop body shops that operated in the shadow of Shea Stadium.

Or so I've been told.

What brings this bit of urban legend to mind is a newly issued report from the oddly named Ponemon Institute (gotta catch 'em all?), which states that over 637,000(!) laptops are lost and/or stolen from U.S. airports each year. That's over 12,000 laptops a week. I don't know about you, but when I travel for business, the one thing that never leaves my sight (except for going through a scanner) is my laptop. I'm thinking that a lot of people really want a new laptop, and business travel seems to be the equivalent of leaving your car at the Queens Plaza Mall.

This statistic bears some truth to my train of thought:

"Travelers seem to lack confidence that they will recover lost laptops. About 77 percent of people surveyed said they had no hope of recovering a lost laptop at the airport, with 16 percent saying they wouldn’t do anything if they lost their laptop during business travel. About 53 percent said that laptops contain confidential company information, with 65 percent taking no steps to protect the information."

Via MacWorld