This is an interesting study: What would happen to your personal and corporate information that sits on your smartphone if you lost it? Answer: at least 89% of the time someone would want it. They took 50 smartphones, loaded them with fictitious information, and placed them in New York City, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in various public places. Then they monitored how the information was being accessed. It’s called the HoneyStick Project and is sponsored by Symantec and Sprint.

Consider what’s on your phone. Everyone you speak to, where you work, and who you work with. Where you live, shop, eat, and bank. Where you’ve been in the last 6 months. Every text you’ve sent and received. Emails, both personal and professional, as well as their attachments. Pictures, videos, and other potentially embarrassing items. Files that contain handy references including passwords. How about the latest project you’ve worked at your job. Imagine that out in the wild and potentially be used against you or your company. Think your boss would be unhappy with having that big deal compromised?

Here’s some highlights of what they found: (It goes without saying that virtually all phones were accessed even if to find the owner.)

• 89% had personal information accessed (see above for all the goodies you’d be offering)
• 83% had company information accessed
• 45% of the time company emails were accessed and files named ‘HR Salaries’ were hit 53%
• 43% of online banking accounts were attempted to be accessed

It’s not all bad news. There are some helpful tips on how to protect your phone. You can even make it unusable. We don’t like to think of our phones as bricks, but given the choice between having yourself violated or having to cough up another $500 for a new device; it’s a pretty good trade-off. The simplest way to protect your phone is a to use a pin, better yet, set the phone to totally lock up and erase the data after a number of attempts (set it for 10 to be on the safe side). This will stop probably 70% of the finders to begin with. Use some of the other tips and you could drop your liability to about 10% and if it’s a corporate phone with some kind of MDM (Mobile device Management)  software, you could make it 100%.

Remember, these little devices combine two conflicting things: lifestyle convenience and lots of critical data. The more convenient these devices are and how easy they make life, the more liability they provide, as well as an incentive to obtain them. Be smart and read the study.