BBC lost laptops: a case of trial by PR
You can tell it’s the summer silly season. Take, for example, the story doing the rounds today about the BBC losing 146 laptops, 65 mobile phones and 17 BlackBerrys to the tune of a headline-friendly £240,000 over the past two years.
It sounds terrible, especially given that the money comes from the public via the licence fee, but when, or if, you stop to think about it – that actually represents less one and a half laptops a week.
Careless? Yes, but hardly a big surprise given that the Beeb employs 23,000 members of staff, often on the move and working unconventional hours. OK, they don’t all carry laptops or other portable devices, but it’s fair to assume that a good chunk of them have a laptop and at least a BlackBerry.
To put that in perspective, the British Computer Society compiled figures three years ago looking to benchmark the normal level of laptop loss and theft among companies. It found that laptop loss ranged between 20 and 40 machines per thousand in a year.
Even at the bottom end of that estimate, and assuming only 5,000 BBC staff carry a laptop, that would equate to 200 in two years, which is well below what the BBC is being castigated for in reports. In fact, I’ve personally lost almost as many pieces of hardware on various late-night commutes and taxi-rides.
Now I’m no apologist for BBC staffers treating their publicly-funded hardware with reckless abandon, but there is a case for putting this story in a hall of fame for gratuitous product plugging by street-savvy PR shenanigans
The revelations came out after a Freedom of Information Act request, not from a journalist or newspaper, but from a software security company, Absolute Software, which (wait for it) sells a security service for tracking down laptops when they have been stolen.
The company, in a press release issued earlier today, took the BBC to task over the fact that only 19 pieces of the lost hardware had been recovered by the corporation, although the BBC said 15 laptops, three mobiles and one BlackBerry were recovered and that whenever a suspected theft or loss was reported, “data security breach procedures” were invoked as necessary.
“It’s arguable whether BBC laptops are in fact ‘appropriately’ protected – the sheer number of devices that were lost or stolen and not recovered would suggest the opposite,” said Absolute Software’s Dave Everitt . “The BBC would do well to ensure they are using the technology that’s already installed in most laptops to track such stolen devices as well as smartphones and recover them, or at least render them impossible for others to use.“
Fine sentiments no doubt, but if I was running the security side of a corporate mobile strategy I’d be super cautious of a company that would run so quickly to the media, and trade so ruthlessly and publicly on the misfortune of another organisation that probably isn’t performing any worse than the industry average.
Quite how the BBC is paying so much for its laptops – £1,500 a piece, according to the research – is another matter altogether.
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We should take caution in everything especially to these technical gadgets and facilities. Great post.