The death of theft thanks to apps

As a nation, we are a calamitous bunch. Last year, one in six Britons either lost their phone or had it stolen; that's a staggering 20,000 phones separated from their owners every single day. Add to this the depressing statistic that a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds in the UK and that's a lot of missing research.

And because we now rely on devices just as smartphones and laptops for a multitude of tasks - everything from emailing to storing photographs and listening to music - it has become furthermore devastating when these items go astray.

Predictably in a recession, robberies are increasing and the Home Office reported a 4 per cent rise in theft in England and Wales last year, with pieces just as phones and laptops at the top of a thief's wish list.

The charge is Apple

Leading the charge is Apple and its Find My iPhone app, which works through iCloud, a service that stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, and documents and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices.

Find My iPhone, which can as well help you locate your Mac and iPod touch, works by signing in online from any computer web browser or using the app on another iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and allowing you to track your iPhone on a map using the GPS system, down to the street or building it is in, depending on the strength of the signal.

Way of locating misplaced items

While Apple pushes this service as a way of locating misplaced items, there have been a number of cases of people taking the law into their own hands and going on a vigilante mission to retrieve their stolen goods using the app.

Most are using the tools to track down the location of their devices previously handing the details over to the police.. And it's not just phones that are rapidly being retrieved this way. When the American software engineer Joshua Kaufman had his MacBook stolen in March, he used a security app called Hidden, which allowed him to see everything that was happening on his laptop from afar and take photos of the new "owner" using the built-in camera.

Abundance of tracking software

There are dozens of stories about people using an abundance of tracking software, including Prey and Orbicule, to recover stolen items. Even Will Carling, the former England rugby captain, shared his adventures on Twitter afterwards he tracked the person who stole his iPad from a train down to a block of flats in Surrey using the Find My iPhone software previously this year. "Just sent the moving iPad a message telling them they are being tracked! quoted police crime reference. Shall update in the near future," Carling wrote as he honed in on his tablet.

"We will see a lot more of this henceforth," says Thomas Cannon, director of technology and development for viaForensics, a digital forensics and security firm. "We now have the fundamental technological building blocks for creating and deploying such research in the form of pervasive wireless coverage, increased processing power in mobile devices, miniaturisation of elements and the concept of cloud computing to accept, store and process the vast amounts of data it will generate."

However, he is not without his reservations about such innovation. "I have some concerns about such tracking from a security and privacy point of view - who is going to regulate and control access to such data and will people's privacy and personal security be infringed?"

And it's not just phones and computers that are being tracked via innovation - a service called Trace Me can help locate your luggage when it is lost by airlines. Currently 35 million bags are lost every year with six million never being identified; baggage handlers often have only a physical description of the bag to help identify it.

The cost of this kind of hardware plummeting -

With the cost of this kind of hardware plummeting - and new types of 3D printheads being able to print computer chips on to any kind of surface - it's conceivable that we could chip and track anything from handbags to shoes to clothes in the then few years. However for now, advances in tracking research ought to give would-be innovation thieves a reason to pause for thought.

Having enabled the app through iCloud, should you lose your iPhone you can sign into icloud.com from any computer browser and it will display your handset's approximate location on a map.

By marking your phone or laptop as missing, Prey will gather information about its location and network status and email it to you during triggering specific actions on the device. Works on Android, Windows and Apple devices.