Upgrade column: Lost laptops litter major airports

The other day a colleague of mine over on silicon.com wrote about London's Heathrow airport as a hotspot for lost laptops (900 every week).

It's not the only place. Major airports across Europe and North America each end up holding hundreds of these notebook PCs every week. I dread to think about other devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.

However, the laptops are most worrying. The study covered on silicon.com was sponsored by Dell and carried out by the Ponemon Institute which found a whopping 57 per cent of these misplaced devices are never claimed.

I've even heard anecdotal evidence of people being too rushed to catch a plane to go back to a place where they probably left their machine - a duty free shop, toilets or security check, say.

I guess the calculation seems a simple one between the cost of rebooking a ticket and the cost of the device. But it isn't that simple.

A laptop's data is often worth many times more than the device itself. But that's OK too, right, if it's secure?

You know what's coming next - the Ponemon study found 55 per cent of business travellers say their devices aren't protected (though it is possible IT departments might have encrypted some laptops without less tech-savvy users even realising it) and 42 per cent saying their devices aren't even backed up.

The mind boggles.

And the worst airports for lost laptops besides LHR? Los Angeles LAX comes in at 1,200 per week, Miami MIA at 1,000, New York JFK at 900 and Chicago O'Hare at 825.

It is interesting to me that Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson ATL airport - no slouch in passenger-number terms - can be so much lower than these (albeit still in the US top 10) with 450 losses per week.

What is it that makes Atlanta almost three times lower in the lost laptop stakes than LAX? Surely it can't just be a difference in estimates - note, all the figures in the study were estimates as reported by airline officials. (To quote: "Exact loss frequencies were typically not calculated or available for review.")

Together, the average for large airports in the US is 286 laptops lost per day. I'll leave you with that one more time… per day.

Tony Hallett is atlarge.com's site director and editorial director for the Technology and Business division of CNET Networks UK.