Anyone who has travelled by air with their laptop knows what a hassle it can
be. If you forget to remove your laptop from your bag security officials will
end up checking it for explosives before you can go on your way.
According to a recent
study commissioned by Dell from the Ponemon Institute, some of the nation’s
large and medium-size airports report that around 637,000 laptops are reported
lost each year. The place a laptop is most likely to be lost is at a security
checkpoint.
The study says that about 10,278 laptops are reported as lost each week at
36 of the nation’s largest airports and that out of that number of lost laptops
65% of them are not reclaimed. At medium-sized airports across the country,
approximately 2,000 notebooks are lost each week and 69% of the lost computers
at the medium airports are not reclaimed.
The study also polled travelers and found that 77% of those it surveyed
report that they have no hope of recovering a lost laptop at the airport. More
surprising is that the study found that 16% of travelers who lost a laptop
while traveling on business would do nothing to get it back.
Of those surveyed, 53% say that they have confidential business information
on their laptops and 65% of those people say that they take no steps to protect
that confidential data. The Ponemon Institute says that in a survey of
companies 76% report the loss of at least one laptop per year with 22% of that
number resulting from theft or criminal mischief.
Dell is currently the second
largest shipper of PCs in the world and used the study as a tool to promote
its new laptop data security and recovery services.