Losing my phone last weekend was very stressful. I’m the sort of person who is typically incredibly careful with my belongings, especially when it comes to highly personal gadgets with private content that aren’t exactly inexpensive or easy to replace. Unfortunately for me, the service I was using to try and wipe my mobile phone clean of any potentially harmful data was malfunctioning terribly, and I’m sure someone out there is now enjoying snooping through my very intimate photos and text messages.
Of course, these are merely first world problems and hardly compare to the sort of security breaches that can endanger an entire nation. I can’t even imagine how panicked I’d be if I was some sort of military official who’d lost a tablet device or mobile phone carrying around enough private data to actually disrupt the safety of the public at large.
Fortunately, there exists a group of researchers at Virginia Tech who are avidly working towards solving dilemmas like the above.
“A group of mobile computing researchers at Virginia Tech have come up with a way to completely wipe sensitive information from Android devices based on the person’s location. The researchers say that their system could be used under a variety of scenarios — from preventing hospital personel from misusing patients’ sensitive personal information to people in the military who should not be carrying sensitive strategic information around with them.”
Now if only they could help me locate my lost mobile phone, eh?
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