Looking back at my own portable storage of private information, I suspect that many people simply don't even think about it. Then, there is the mentality that it won't happen to me. Both big mistakes. I fell into the latter category since I never let my laptop out of my sight. In a public place, the bag never even left my shoulder. Still not secure enough.

I used to carry a wealth of personal information on my laptop with my previous employer. Nothing financial and still short of what an identity thief needs but someone looking for a simple address list would have hit gold. The question arises - did I need it? Well, yes. My laptop was also my development workstation so I had to have the databases the application ran against on my laptop for testing. I did use the BIOS password protection for my hard disk but as I have learned, that simply is not enough.