COMPANY PROFILE
ABSOLUTE SOFTWARE > IN THE BUSINESS OF COMPUTER RECOVERY
WORDS BY E. LEE GRIGGS
in the recovery of stolen or lost laptops.”
Midgley said, “With LoJack there is no comparison between the two. The application being used by the school is LANrev and has a webcam enabling tool that allows the end user to take photographs by the webcam. It is used as a theft recovery tool.”
A high school student in suburban Philadelphia is suing his school district for allegedly spying on him through the webcam of a school-issued laptop. This begs the question: Are such practices widespread in schools and corporations? There is no way to tell whether schools or companies are using webcams to monitor their employees. The technology is certainly available.
MacDirectory recently had the opportunity to speak with Stephen Midgley, vice president, global marketing for Absolute Software , a company that has been in business for nearly 20 years. Absolute Software provides Computrace® LoJack® for Laptops. This is the industry leading software-based theft recovery service that tracks, locates and recovers stolen computers.
I asked him if LoJack was similar to the software being used by the school to “aid
The publisher of LANrev was
acquired last year by Absolute Software, which is now marketing a different program for theft recovery that requires a police report before Absolute staff (not its customers) can initiate recovery efforts.
Midgley went on to say, “We are not going to be marketing that product. We are disabling that feature. LoJack for laptops is a theft recovery tool and the big difference is how the application is handled. If a consumer has LoJack installed in their computer and the computer is stolen, what they do is they phone the police and report that theft. We are then notified and we activate the software in an attempt to recover that device. We do not initiate the theft recovery process until we have received and validated a theft report from the police department outlining the incident. There area lot of tools out there that carry themselves as theft recovery software using the webcam
technology but we do not believe that is an effective tool.”
I asked Midgley, what does Absolute Software publish besides LoJack?
“Absolute Software began, it’s a 16-year- old company, based in Vancouver, Canada. We basically began as a theft recovery company primarily in the commercial or consumer base and we obviously do theft recovery in cases where the laptop is stolen and the consumer wants the device back. Where the consumer wants the files destroyed on the stolen unit, we also offer the remote destruction service.
“Absolute Software is in the business of computer recovery and we are also in the business of asset tracking as our software is basically embedded in many OEM products. What we do is provide IT with the ability to track these devices both on and off the network. For the consumer, the laptop is basically like their wallet. If you think about what’s on your device, it basically has your life on it. The person with your laptop can usually figure out your bank account, personal data, company or business files, personal e-mail, family photos, tax information, addresses, passwords and more. A lot of consumers don’t employ proper encryption. Many owners say my laptop never leaves my home so I don’t have to worry about that but a very high percentage of thefts are from the home. People need to think about that as well as their home security. They need to be sure they have the appropriate software installed in their computers to aid in the location and recovery of the device.”
For more information on Absolute
Software and LoJack, go to their site at .
118 MacDirectory
