This is good in a way, since we have instant access to almost everything we need wherever we go, but what happens if we loose, misplace, or God forbid, someone steals our precious cellphone? In that case my friends, we’re on a roller-coaster that has a stinky pond as a final stop, in other words, we’d be better off losing our wallet.

But fear not, not everything is lost. Thankfully there exist programs that’ll help you find your lost/stolen electronic property and possibly even bring the thieves to justice. How do they work? Most smart phones have GPS technology, which can be used in conjunctions with the retrieval software to send information about the device’s location. If that’s not the case, it’s possible to define the phone’s location through signal strength analysis from the few nearest stations. It’s less precise, but nonetheless very helpful. But what about flash drives, cameras or even laptops? It gets a bit harder with those, but essentially, you receive the IP address of the computer they’ve been connected to, with which you can (usually it’s the police who does that), if you get a permit, obtain the postal address of the person it was used by at that time.

Most of such services require an annual fee to use their software, but there are some other alternatives you might want to consider as well. For example, JustStolen is a service set up by a group of police officers, that offers you a place to store your gadget’s serial identification number, which makes the process of finding the owner of stolen property quicker and easier.