Putting a Private Detective in Your Laptop

Baruch Sienna figured his teenage son’s laptop was gone forever. During a party in Israel, a thief had taken his MacBook, and there were no witnesses.

“The police were very unhelpful,” Mr. Sienna said, speaking from Jerusalem. “They said, ‘You’ll never see your laptop again.’ ”

But the son was fortunate that his father had installed Undercover, an antitheft program, on his computer. He remotely activated the software, which grabbed screen shots of the thief’s online activities, while the Mac’s built-in camera shot pictures of him. After eight months of activity on the Mac, the software had given police enough information to identify the thief and put the MacBook back in Mr. Sienna’s hands.

For the very reason you like to carry laptops, iPads, e-book readers and smartphones — they are lightweight and portable — they are easy to steal or misplace. The 2009 Computer Security Institute Computer Crime and Security Survey found that 42 percent of respondents had lost a laptop or other portable device to a thief in the last year. According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, 12,000 laptops are lost each week in American airports. Most people assume they are gone for good; only a third of those turned in to the airports’ lost-and-found departments are reclaimed.

You can keep an eye on your devices and not leave them visible and unattended, but they might best be protected with some software. A number of good programs are available for laptops, phones and tablets. Many will try to locate the computer when it is connected to the Internet. Others log keystrokes, take snapshots of Web pages visited, monitor e-mail being written and even take a picture of the user with the device’s built-in Webcam.

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