Two years ago, I began to say in lectures that we had seen a 200% rise in the number of cell phones passing through our forensics lab. Today, I am beginning to say that the increase is more like 500%.
As a society, we seem increasingly to regard our cell phones as an appendage of our bodies. To confirm our addiction to our phones, Nielsen recently conducted a study which offers some interesting stats. They studied the monthly phone bills of 60,000 U.S. customers and here's what they came up with:
Women spend 22% more time chatting on their phones than men, spending an average of 856 minutes on the phone monthly compared to 667 minutes for men.
Women also text more, sending or receiving an average of 601 texts per month - the number was 447 for men.
Black, Hispanic and Asian users text more than white users - no explanation why.
It comes as no surprise to anyone that teenagers are obsessive texters, texting a mind and thumb-numbing 2,779 texts per month.
Texting has been a boon to computer forensics, supplementing the gold nuggets so often found in e-mail. Divorce cases most often involve cell phones in our shop, closely followed by theft of proprietary data cases. And as the teens grow up, I can only imagine that the volume of this kind of electronic evidence will increase dramatically. I like that thought. :-)
E-mail: snelson@senseient.com Phone: 703-359-0700
