Stolen Gadgets Call Home With Pictures of Thieves

New technology lets cameras, phones, computers automatically email owners
By Laila Weir,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 6, 2008 3:40 PM CDT
Stolen Gadgets Call Home With Pictures of Thieves
Eye-Fi camera memory cards email pictures to their owners when logged on to a familiar Wi-Fi network. This feature let one woman identify the thieves who took her lost camera.   (AP Photo)

Technology letting cameras and other gadgets automatically contact their owners is thwarting thieves, Reuters reports. GadgetTrak software, for example, lets stolen BlackBerrys send data from thieves’ SIM cards to their rightful owners and allows Macs to shoot and send video of robbers. In other cases, emailed data not intended to stop thefts has helped owners track missing items.

Take the case of the woman who lost her digital camera in a restaurant in Florida. Her Eye-Fi memory card had Wi-Fi capacity and automatically emailed pictures to her computer. Along with her own vacation photos, she got shots of the people who made off with her forgotten camera—employees of the restaurant where she left it. (More gadget stories.)

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