The Lost Phone Experiment by Vodafone

written by Houke de Kwant on December 2, 2012

Yesterday I told you that The Lost Phone Experiment was the best website I visited last week. Because it is in Dutch the most of you probably don’t understand what it all says, but when you do it’s pretty cool. So that’s why I decided to explain what Vodafone did. In this Lost Phone Experiment they ‘Lost’ 100 phones across the Netherlands. They lost the phones to see what would happen with them, for six days they recorded several stats about the phones and presented them on the website.

According to Vodafone, from the 100 phones, 28 phones where returned in those 6 days, the other 72 ‘disappeared’.

The second slide shows how long it took for the phone to be found and to be returned. On the first time it was very quick, after 15 minutes a phone was found and returned after 50 minutes. For the slowest found phone it took over 20 hours to be found and over 35 hours to be returned.

Then they started analyzing the persons who and places where the phones where returned, 25% of them where women and 75% where men.

Then the stats I was very interested in… What happened with the not returned phones? According to Vodafone a phone is labelled lost when they stopped sending out GPS signal or when they stopped using data over the network. Of course they added some fun… 0.01% of the phones where taken by aliens :p. But for the real stats, the other phones disappeared because of water damage, low batteries or they where stolen.

The next stats are important for you to know which contacts in your phone will help you get it returned if lost. If you have the number of your home, your father and your mother separately in your phone, people will most likely call/ message your mom!

If you loose your phone, most likely it will be within a few kilometers of your position. In this experiment, the average distance was 2km. The longest distance one phone travelled was 56km and together they travelled 176km.

Having accounts on social media probably won’t be used to find you. Of all those phones only two tweets and one facebook message was left to the owner.

You also don’t have to be afraid of your phone running through your data plan as only 46kb was used per phone on average.

And last but not least, don’t worry about the wrong music on your phone, it won’t be used!