How Many Phones Will Be Lost or Stolen During the Olympic Games?

From the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy S III to various BlackBerry devices, an estimated 67,000 phones are expected to be lost or stolen during the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London.

This assessment comes from Venafi, a key and certificate management solutions firm, which based its figure on the number of mobile phones (50,000) that are normally lost or stolen in London during any two-week period. During the Olympics, more than a million people are expected to enter the city, resulting in an additional 17,000 lost or stolen phones.

"There's been an explosion of corporate data available to users from their mobile devices," Gregory Webb, Venafi's Vice President of Marketing, said in an e-mail statement. "This is a real danger and one that is often overlooked. With the ever-shrinking boundaries between work devices and work-enabled personal devices, lost or stolen smartphones and other mobile devices that fall into the wrong hands place companies and business data at tremendous risk."

Venafi estimates that 214.4 terabytes of data (the equivalent of more than 200 million books) will be lost or end up in the wrong hands during the Olympic Games. This estimate does not include the loss or theft of laptops and tablets. But it does include mobile phones from Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Samsung, Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM), Nokia (NYSE: NOK), and every other cellular device manufacturer.

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