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?