My brother the musician had his apartment burglarized last week. The bad guys had probably cased the place because all that went missed was his MacBook and his girlfriend’s laptop.
My brother isn’t oozing with extra cash so it’s not like he can just lay down a cool $1400 for a new MacBook. Needless to say, he’s upset for a variety of reasons – mostly that awful feeling of being violated when someone breaks into your house.
The loss of his MacBook got me thinking that GPS should come as a standard feature in all laptops as a way to deter their theft. It would only involve some software and/or a GPS. This could help the police track down the laptop or destroy the data on it if the laptop couldn’t be foud. This kind of service is available now through companies such as LoJack, which offers a LoJack for Laptops service for $49.99 a year.
It’s a solid option but the reality is these services should come as a standard option on all new laptops given a laptop is apparently stolen every 53 seconds. If it meant adding an additional $20 or even $50 for the software and/or GPS, I’m think most laptop owners would be happy to pay for it. I mean, if Apple offered a iLocateMyLaptop service for $20 a year, you’d likely get a lot of people signing up.
The lack of a GPS/theft protection service as something that just comes with a new laptop is puzzling given it would give a laptop maker some great goodwill if they embraced it. Strange.
Of course, this is little consolation to my brother, who is now sadly MacBook-less. If, on the odd chance, someone’s got an extra MacBook lying around collecting dust, let me know.
More: Thomas Hawk had a nice rant about this issue last year that included this quote: “So answer me this. They can put GPS in a cell phone. Why not put GPS in your laptop? And why not also put GPS in your car DVD player (I’ve had several break ins with my car at West Oakland BART and as such no longer park there)?”
There’s little reason to get software to “destroy the data” on a laptop if it’s stolen. If my laptop gets stolen, the thief won’t have access to a shred of my data, since it’s all stored on a Truecrypt-encrypted drive.
Truecrypt is totally open source and free. I can’t figure out why corporations don’t start using it – it’d eliminate the privacy and data-loss issues whenever a laptop is stolen from an employee’s car or house or desk…
I was looking for a similar solution just a couple days ago. LoJack claims to recover 3/4 laptops stolen, which is pretty good considering that all they do is track the IP
GPS is a good idea, although the laptop would still need some way of calling back with the data. LoJack just uses the internet connection, but this requires that the thief supplies a wireless password or another way to connect (this is my understanding, anyway). Maybe cell phone towers would be useful, both for the positioning data (I’m not sure how sophisticated cell phone towers are in locating the cell phone, but it would probably be more effective than GPS indoors) and relaying the information back to the owner/police.
Hi Mark,
You missed a chance to plug a Canadian Tech success story! That LoJack for Laptops technology is provided by Absolute Software of Vancouver. Not only have they signed up a bunch of distributors and partners, the stock has gone from $3 to $35 in less than 18 months! Great performance, and with a market cap of $800 million it is likely to make it onto the TSX index.
I don’t own any stock, but it has been a cool story to watch…
Paul: Yeah, I wondered about how the connection issue. I guess anyone who used a stolen laptop to connect to the Web would trigger the service.
Duncan: Thanks for the plug! Looks like one of those low profile Canadian success stories.
The connection thing seems like it would make the LoJack approach not work…but in 2007 a laptop that never connects to any network is useful primarily as a paperweight.
So as soon as the thief tries to do ANYTHING useful with the stolen machine it yells for help.