Recently, T-Mobile USA had to admit that they lost personal data belonging to Sidekick customers and only a small fraction of it could be recovered. The news resulted in damaging PR for the carrier, as well as tangible financial losses as they offered customers a $100 customer appreciation card, in addition to a free month of data service.
This news, while it did not affect BlackBerry users, leaves us wondering just how secure is our data? A BlackBerry can store your data, back it up to a computer, or connect to a server such as Rackspace, which can offer Microsoft Exchange storing and restoring of your data. App World adds a new dimension to our data storage as we now have a plethora of applications taking control of our data storage and restoration as well.
As applications become increasingly popular, with data being increasingly stored on the cloud, we are trusting these organizations to keep our personal data safe.
When speaking with Jasmine Noel of Ptak, Noel and Associates, it became very apparent that there doesn’t seem to be any standards associated with data storage and restoration. While carriers and third parties are increasingly taking control of our data, there is very little in the way of ensuring that your data is in good hands. It all comes down to trust, but that simply isn’t enough.
Getting a best practices and standards system could really address this issue but it isn’t easy. We want to know that if we are entrusting our data to a company, that they can be relied on to restore said data. When the Microsoft Danger servers that were charged with restoring Sidekick data failed, we found out there was no backup system in place and that the data resided on the cloud, with little ability to be restored. We could have avoided this with more transparency.
We want IT professionals to get together and understand what their back up and restore capabilities are. Do they test their processes internally? Can we see the results?
Now, some will take the opinion “if it’s important, you should never trust anyone else to hold it for you.” This is a solid argument but it’s not conducive to growing the industry. Consumers and enterprise should both be able to trust their service providers to hold data for them without having to have a redundant storage process. It’s this trust that is going to propel the smartphone industry forward, but service providers need to earn that trust.
So I put the question to you: Do you trust third parties to be able to restore your data? What proof do you have that they deserve this trust?
BoxTone just launched a free application for monitoring your BlackBerry’s health, and as someone who needs to count every kilobyte lest he be smoten by the Almighty Rogers Overage Charge, I can say this is a must-have for the heavy-duty BlackBerry user. Graphs show the progress of 24-hour monitoring of vital information like…
The latest projections from SNL Kagan are predicting some solid growth for wireless data, particularly surround mobile e-mail. Growing adoption of mobile data services, forecasted to increase revenues by 16% annually to $100 billion by 2017, will partially be thanks to the likes of mobile e-mail which will reach 62% penetration (good news for BlackBerry, obviously), but the bigger driver will be mobile video. It will be seeing 22% growth year-on-year, and with screens like the BlackBerry Bold and iPhone becoming prevalent, it’s easy to see how people could be getting more excited about mobile TV and movies. We’re still waiting on 
When the Simply Everything plan came out, it came off as a 
I was going to sit on this one until next week’s podcast, but it was just too good to hold out on. Member of Parliament David McGuinty is heading up a little something called Bill C-555 (a.k.a the Get Connected Fairly Act), which is aiming to eliminate extraneous wireless costs like data overages and system access fees for Canadian consumers and enterprises in the hopes of increasing adoption and overall quality of life. Best part of all? He wants all Canadian mobiles to be unlocked. A noble cause indeed, and one that BBCool is most certainly behind. If you’ve got 13 minutes, it’s always awesome to hear about the Canadian wireless landscape sucking just a little bit less. Go ahead and 
