I, like a lot of you, own a mobile phone that stores more than just a few phone numbers. Being a BlackBerry Pearl it also has copies of my recent emails, my full contacts lists and all sorts of notes that I find useful. Obviously this information is backed up, so losing a phone is not a problem in that respect. But when this phone’s keyboard packed up I wanted to erase this data before I returned it for replacement.
A quick call to Vodafone and a replacement was on its way, but I had to return the broken one. Fine I said, but how do I erase my personal data on this phone? All its suggestions involved using the keyboard, not much help really. Why not have a reset button on these phone that will clear all the data on them? Better than that, why can’t the service provider ( Vodafone in this case ) send a signal to the phone to instruct it to erase all the data on it, obviously with your permssion?
Is it any surprise that personal data theft is a big problem nowadays when such small devices that can easily get lost or stolen can contain such a wealth of private information?
Come on you phone providers, think about security: the more information we store on these devices the more important it is that this information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Or am I just being paranoid?
Permalink
May 14th, 2008 at 7:26 am
It’s ironic that you use a BlackBerry Mark (Oh, and it’s ‘Pearl’ not ‘Perl’ - you’ve got programming on the brain!), as that’s probably the easiest device to remote wipe and remote lock. It’s a core part of the device OS.
Are you running BES? (As a business user it’s silly not to). If so, you have full remote control over your old phone from the BES admin application. If you’re using BIS then your network has the same facilities from their end.
Your plea to the phone providers is interesting. Both Microsoft and Nokia have readily available solutions for business mobile fleets, allowing you to nuke lost phones.
The gap is probably in the unmanaged phone space, typicaly those used by consumers rather than businesses.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Thanks for the reply Paul, I know that the Blackberry system when running BES will do this. ( the reason that I’m not running it is not that I’m ’silly’ but the Cloudmark anti-spam service on my exchange box was crashing and I didn’t want add to it’s problems. Installing BES is on my list of things to do however)
I still feel than the service providers should have a solution in place for erasing the data on lost / stolen phones. What about the the growing numbers of iPhone users for example? I think not having a solution in place by these people is negligent to say the least. I’m glad to hear that MS and Nokia have such things in place but you would never know this when talking to Vodaphone business.
Another good reason for reading PcPro to find out about what is happening in the mobile arena. Now what is the name of the guy who writes that excellent column ?