No Cell Phone Encryption – Mc Donald's Sued for $3 Million

A couple from Arkansas is suing Mc Donald’s for $3 Million after they found rather “revealing” pictures on the Internet. The cell phone containing these private photos was left in a Mc Donald’s store in Arkansas that promised to hold on to it until Philip Sherman, the plaintif would return to pick it up. It seems like one of the employees got a hold of the un-encrypted files on the phone and posted them online. Read the whole story on BBC.

Mr. Sherman teaches everybody a good lesson here: Don’t walk around with unencrypted data you don’t want anybody else to see. But he shouldn’t feel too bad about it. Even celebreties have already revealed their phone secrets. The good side of this story is that data security companies will get a boost of confidence to be on the right track and hopefully bring us some easier-to-use cell phone protection technology soon.

The current solutions you could use to protect your cell phone data are either complicated, expensive, or not as secure as we hope they would be.

For one, there is Goldlock, a company offering custom-made Nokia phones that come with out of the box encryption – probably one of the better alternatives if you like those old and outdated Nokia phones. There is also the Diamond Crypto Smartphone, selling for a mere $1.3 Million. And finally, there are a lot of smaller applications that may protect some of your files, all with questionalbe effectivenes. Even the encryption feature included with Windows CE based phones is only helpful if someone would steal your memory card to read it in another phone – not if someone finds your cell phone.

We will certainly keep you posted on any development in the field of cell phone encryption. Please subscribe to our email feed to stay informed.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/burgermac/1018168401/