I came across this story at Dark Reading about a study published by the Ponemon Institute and Dell Computer that estimates that 12,000 laptops are lost in US airports every week. In addition, they claim that only about 3,600 are recovered. Furthermore, over half of those lost have confidential business or customer data on them.
The study says that LAX reports that about 1,200 laptops are lost there each week. I was at first skeptical of this number, but given that nearly a million passengers per week pass through LAX and that according to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) 25% of all travelers carry laptops, I guess the number isn't so unreasonable after all.
If the study is accurate, this means that about 600,000 laptops are being lost yearly in the US. According to the story, laptops are usually kept by the airports for some period of time, and then destroyed.
Not surprisingly, most of the laptops are lost at the security checkpoints or the departure gate.
As the Dark Reading story notes, "Interestingly, only 1 percent of the respondents admitted personally losing a laptop computer. However, 84 percent say they know someone who has lost a laptop while traveling on business."
In a related story this week in the New York Times, TSA has approved a newly designed carry-on bags that will let laptops pass through security without having to be removed for the X-ray inspection. The new bags are expected to be available by September or October from Pathfinder Luggage and Targus among others, I assume.
This should, hopefully, reduce the number of lost laptops.
Update: On my local news channel tonight, a reporter claimed that airport officials at Dulles International Airport said they disagreed with the study results. Dulles officials said they had only about 400 laptops lost all of last year, not the 400 per week that the study estimated, and that most "lost laptops" were returned to their owners.
Stay tuned - there may be more to this story.
