Some interesting stories about lost laptops, cameras and cameras

Nowadays, the number of useful (and not so) functions in various kinds of gadgets is so diverse that the owner of the device does not always know about all these functions. However, sometimes they are very useful - even if the owner did not know about them, or did not use. Sometimes all this helps to recover a lost or stolen phone / laptop. In this mini-review collected four such cases. Some of the stories previously already slipped on Habré, but it does not interfere with recalling these curious, sometimes, situations.

iCloud and stolen iPhone
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Once again, there is a stolen Apple product. But it so happened that the iCloud service allows you to automatically upload photos received by the phone to your personal storage, Photo Stream. You can access these photos from anywhere, as long as the Internet is available.

The iPhone was stolen from the owner, but the thief did not know that the iCloud function was activated on the device. So the thief took pictures of himself, his girlfriend and other people (as it turned out, with Disney Cruise), and the photos appeared in the Photo Stream of the owner of the phone. When the girl with whom the phone was stolen, turned to the leadership of Disney Cruise, and the phone returned to the victim.

Android phone from taxi and Google+



Amy Stewart has forgotten (or lost) her Android smartphone in a taxi. Immediately after the discovery of the loss, she turned to the management of the taxi service. Those interviewing the driver who was transporting the girl received the answer that the driver had not seen any phone.



However, after some time, photos began to appear in the Google+ account of the owner of the lost device, apparently taken by the new owner. In some photographs, the taxi driver was clearly visible, who said that he could not find the phone. The girl turned to the management of the company, and the driver had to return the device.

Photos from the drowned camera



In August 2010, a fireman from British Columbia dropped a camera into Deep Bay, near Vancouver. It is clear that the owner of the camera said goodbye to her. But a year later, naturalist and photographer Marcus Thompson found this camera during another dive under water. He picked up the camera from the bottom, took out the SD card, and was able to recover about 50 photos.

Thompson posted some photos on Google+, and a few hours later the owner of the camera was found. It is clear that the device was no longer subject to restoration, but the former owner did not count on it, he was very happy with the lost, as it was believed, family photos taken at the resort.

MacBook and Hidden



Joshua Kaufman never thought he would ever use the Hidden program. But when his laptop was stolen, he remotely launched this program, activated the necessary functions, and began to get pictures from the camera while the laptop was running. Many of the photos turned out to be a thief, and he was able to easily calculate by means of GPS tracking. For some reason, it took the police two full months to arrest the criminal, but in the end, the attacker was caught, and the laptop returned to the owner.

In general, all the mentioned stories got a happy ending, but it’s still worth remembering that now a smartphone or a laptop is more than just a computing device. On such devices, most of us have a lot of data, from personal photos to logins and passwords to various services and resources. So even a short-term loss of a device can be costly, both literally and figuratively.