It looks like The Inquirer‘s coverage of Lost Laptop may have resulted in the site/business being removed. David Neal updates us all:
LOST LAPTOP, the, er, entrepreneurial website that we took to our hearts, is no more.
We couldn’t quite believe the site’s premise when it launched. People who found laptops could send the unit in to the firm and collect a reward, while people who lost laptops could pay the firm to get them back. Yeah, that was the bit that got us interested too.
Lost Laptop said that when a laptop was handed in it was assessed in terms of its make, model, condition, and its contents. Once these had been evaluated, a value was attached to the unit. This value was used to work out both the reward for the finder and the price the firm would charge to release the unit to the loser. The fact that a monetary value was put on the contents of the hard drive might have been of some concern to forgetful enterprise users, so we sought to clarify what was actually going on.
The firm claimed to have many satisfied customers, but we were concerned that it might have been breaching privacy and other rules, not to mention the fact that the general premise seemed to raise certain, ahem, moral questions. In addition, the outfit was exposing private documents on some of the units, including CVs, and um, nude photos.
Read more on The Inquirer.