I was on a conference call today with two programmers from a VERY large over night shipping company. They said in passing that recently someone at at their company "lost" a laptop that contained over 15,000 customer accounts, including names and account numbers! The person no longer works there, but this brings up two issues:

1. Why do large corporations like this one allow employees to place this sensitive information on portable devices?
2. How secure are these laptops if they are stolen or "found"? I'm sure any hacker could get into the system and recover the data.

I'm sure this is a much bigger problem than most of would like to admit. I Googled this to see if it was in the news... it was not.