Some years ago, I left my laptop computer on a train from Washington
to New York. Replacing the computer was expensive, but at the time I
was more worried about the data.
Of course I had good backups, but now a copy of all my e-mail,
client files, personal writings and book manuscripts were … well,
somewhere. Probably the drive would be erased by the computer’s new
owner, but maybe my personal and professional life would end up in
places I didn’t want them to be.
If
anything, this problem has gotten worse. Our digital devices have all
gotten smaller, while at the same time they’re carrying more and more
sensitive information.
My laptop is my primary computer. It could easily contain every
e-mail I’ve sent and received over the past 12 years, an enormous
amount of work-related documents, and my personal everything.
I have several USB thumb drives, including a 2-gig drive that serves
as my primary backup. The one I carry with me contains a complete dump
of the past 12 months of my life, in a device so easy to lose some
people I know buy them in bulk.
My cell phone is a Treo. It holds not only my frequently called
phone numbers, but my entire address book — including any personal
notes I’ve made — my calendar for the past six years, hundreds of
e-mails, all my SMS messages, and a log of every phone call I’ve made
and received. At least, it would if I didn’t take specific pains to
clean that information out once in a while.
A friend of mine has a habit of leaving his iPod on airplanes; he’s
been through three so far. The most recent one he lost contained not
only his full music library, but his address book and calendar as well.
And the press regularly reports stories about lost and stolen laptops
with sensitive corporate documents or personal information of hundreds
of thousands of individuals.
I could go on forever.
The point is that it’s now amazingly easy to lose an enormous amount
of information. Twenty years ago, someone could break into my office
and copy every customer file, every piece of correspondence, everything
about my professional life. Today, all he has to do is steal my
computer. Or my portable backup drive. Or my small stack of DVD
backups. Furthermore, he could sneak into my office and copy all this
data, and I’d never know it.
This problem isn’t going away anytime soon.
Bruce Schneier
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