Closer look at Lost Laptop

WE'VE HAD A CLOSER LOOK at Lost Laptop, the service that aims to reunite people with their, er, lost laptop, for a small fee. And we still don't quite know what to make of it.

First things first, because the concept makes us connect palm with forehead whenever we try to make sense of it, we spoke to John King, chief executive and founder at Lost Laptop, who explained how it worked in an email.

King said that the firm does not accept laptops that look dodgy, that is, those with no serial number or hard drive, but accept any others that people hand in to them. In his words the procedure works as follows:

"If you send in a lost laptop then we will pay out a reward between £100 & £3000 depending of make, state of the notebook and the contents therein. The owner will then be charged the comparable amount to retrieve the laptop, plus cost of shipping. For example, if we pay £200 to the person who found it then the person who wants it back will pay £450, plus postage or shipping. We typically charge £250 commission for each case."

Nice work if you can get it.

So what happens if you go on to the site to register your lost laptop and someone has already handed it in? Do you get it back for free? Well, in a word, no.

"If you see your laptop on the site click on 'This is My Laptop'. You will then be asked to complete a questionnaire and asked to forward proof of purchase and any identifying images or documents. We won't send out the laptop until we are sure you are the rightful owner! The easiest way is to show a receipt and serial number. Once you have been confirmed as the owner of the laptop we will take payment and arrange safe tracked shipping."

Oh. We have spent some time trying to work out an appropriate owner response to this, and all we can come up with is some incredulity.

Some people will be only too happy to pay a handling fee to be reunited with a missing laptop, but others may feel more like their property is being held to ransom.

We sent a follow-on question, asking, if Lost Laptop was able to identify an owner through its investigation of a laptop, would it contact them?

"The best protection of data and privacy is to bring misplaced laptops back to their respective owners. That's what we are doing. Our success rate is impressive and we expect that it will be dramatically increased by the new online platform. Users are so thankful for our services and that's our daily motivation. If we uncover the rightful owner through investigation we will try and contact them directly," was the response.

Talking of data protection and privacy, by looking at the site we found that many of the laptops had files that you could look through - many were marked private - in a number of different languages, and some contained photos of the owners, in some cases in various states of undress. We performed these searches for research purposes and found that others included photos from a motorshow and some other travel trips.

We think that this raises the question of whether the company takes any responsibility for the security of the data and the privacy of its owner. Perhaps too, firms should start including "contact Lost Laptop" in their guide for responding to a data breach. Because should they not, then they themselves might be considered not to have performed all possible steps to protect their data. We asked the UK's Information Commissioners Office for its views on the Lost Laptop site and business, but the organisation is still drawing up a response. We expect to have this tomorrow and expect it to say that the ICO is investigating the site and the company.

We've done a lot of digging into issues related to the service Lost Laptop provides, and there are a lot of things to consider. For example, the idea that finders are keepers was disproved this year when a husband and wife were given eleven month suspended sentences for cashing in a winning lottery ticket that they did not buy. Not only that, they also had to pay back the money they had spent plus some interest to the original purchaser and eventual loser of the ticket they cashed. According to a report on the BBC, defence lawyer Rob Ross told the court, "It is important for the public to know that 'finders keepers, losers weepers' is not true and never was true."

Elsewhere, the Citizen's Advice Bureau (CAB) does what it does best and offers a range of advice on what you should do if you find a lost item. It explains, "If you find goods that appear to be lost, then you can keep the goods as long as you have taken reasonable steps to find the owner of the goods, [such as] for example, left them to be claimed at a police station for a reasonable length of time."

The Metropolitan Police meanwhile, has strict rules on the handling of lost or misplaced property. In its information pages it explains, "Police will only deal with property that has been lost or found in a street. All other lost or found property is dealt with by the owner of the property or place in which it is lost or found, the exception to this rule is lost passports. Property lost or found on a public transport system is dealt with by Transport for London."

Anything worth under £50 is expected to be retained by the finder, in case the loser turns up, while anything worth more than this will be looked after by the Police. It adds, "If you hand property in at a police station, you will be asked for your name and address and given a receipt. If the property is not claimed within 28 days you may be entitled to claim it."

According to the CAB unclaimed or abandoned items can only be sold - and we acknowledge that Lost Laptop is not selling anything - after taking a number of appropriate steps. "You must take reasonable steps to trace the original owner if they, or their whereabouts, is unknown. This depends on the circumstances, but might include placing advertisements in local newspapers, notices on local community notice boards or contacting a trade association if the owner has a business."

Legally, we believe that as long as the owner has not actually abandoned their laptop, as in thrown it into a canal, then it remains their property, wherever it may be.

Lost Laptop, as a company hasn't been around very long, Companies House lists it as having been established in August of this year and financed by private investors, confirming statements on the original press release. Correspondence to the firm, an unglamourous address in East London, is handled by one of those companies that helps you set up companies within 24 hours.

Not to mention the fact that some of the files are just a little too juicy and convenient, and one of them contains a text file of blog posts made later than the published 'found date'.

In the face of all this we can't be sure that the Lost Laptop company isn't just some elaborate hoax. All our digging suggests it's real, but rather than being totally taken for a mug, to use the East End vernacular, we asked it outright.

We are still awaiting a response. µ