Ask HN: Have you ever lost a laptop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you ever lost a laptop?

6 pointslalwanivikas6 comments

A few weeks back, there was a theft at my place and I lost all my valuables (cash, credit cards, headphones) but most importantly my laptop. I'm tired and frustrated of going to Police station to inquire about it. I want to fix it!

Here is what I propose:

We can use the power of crowd to locate lost devices. I think most stolen laptops are sold second-hand in grey markets. If we can tell a buyer somehow that the laptop he is about to buy is stolen, there is a high probability that he will not buy it.

We can make a mobile app/website where anyone who has lost a laptop can enter basic details of his device ( Serial No., Model etc.) and whenever anyone is about to buy a second-hand laptop, he can check our app/website and immediately know whether the laptop is stolen or not. This can help people locate their lost devices and can lead them to the thieves.

What do you guys think? This is just one idea that can help people recover their lost devices. There might be many other ways, and we can brainstorm them here. Let's shoot!

PS: Please drop me a line if you are interested in working on this problem!

I'm not suggesting you don't continue to make a better one, but there are quite a few databases like this in the UK and, I imagine, world wide. The top few from this Google search: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=uk+database+stolen+items

Quite often local police services in the UK have databases you can search for serial numbers and so forth. I suspect a big problem for all of them is consumer awareness and consumer effort to enter the details into a site.

There are quite a few potential privacy issues - you can't give away too much (or possibly any) information which may directly identify an owner because serial numbers are guessable and an enterprising thief could use a service which did reveal any information to track down theft targets...

However, I really hope you do come up with a great solution :)

Actually, I wonder if you could use the existing ones and have some sort of meta-search site for it?

1. If you had a Mac, have you tried Find My Mac?

2. Whether you had a Mac or not, I hear a lot of people recommend Prey: https://preyproject.com/

3. I'd imagine a lot of people wouldn't have any clue what their serial number and stuff is, and once their laptop is stolen, I doubt fewer would be able to look this stuff up as they probably don't keep records of this. The model itself is not going to be useful enough.

4. As a person who buys laptops, if I was to buy a used laptop, the last thing on my mind is to check all that. That isn't to say someone else wouldn't. But I'm not sure how receptive the market will be to something like this.

All that said, best of luck, both on the idea and recovering your laptop.

There was a service a while back called "Please Return Me" or somesuch. I found their Facebook page but it looks like it's dead. Anyhow they had tamper-resistant labels with a serial number that you could put on devices. That way if it was lost, someone could get a reward from you to return it.

A similar process might work with this idea.

My one concern is that what happens if you have A selling legitimately to B, then B tries to resell to C? A could trigger the alert, making C think B is a thief.

I have. This is a neat idea.

The only problem is that people buying laptops on the black-market or "grey" market probably just want the cheapest laptop they can get!

That's right nicolime. But if given a choice between a stolen laptop and a clean one, I'm sure majority will opt for later.

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