Our delivery drivers carry a handset for proof of delivery. During a route it holds every stop for the day: names, addresses, telephone numbers, delivery instructions, signatures, and a photograph of each parcel on each doorstep. We have a hundred and eighty of them, and last year forty seven were lost. Some were left on a van roof, some were taken in cab thefts, and one went through a compactor at a customer's site.
Every one of those losses was recorded by fleet as a stock write off. None was recorded as a data incident, because none reached my department until the replacement was ordered, usually three or four days later.
Worse, none of those handsets had a PIN. It was removed in 2020 at the drivers' request, and I agreed. A driver unlocks the device something like a hundred and fifty times a day, often wearing gloves, often in rain, and a six digit code at every stop was adding about twenty minutes to a route. The control had been designed for somebody at a desk. Rather than adapt it, we switched it off and forgot about the risk it had been covering.
Looking at it again, the drivers were right about the PIN and I was wrong about what to do next. A control that cannot be used at the pace of the work does not survive contact with it.
The handsets are now managed centrally and lock whenever they leave the cradle in the cab for more than five minutes, which covers the walk to a doorstep and not much else. Unlocking outside the cradle takes a tap of the driver's badge rather than a code. Route data is removed from the device when the route is closed, and photographs upload and delete as they are taken, so a handset lost in the afternoon holds only the afternoon. Losing one is now a call to the service desk, the same call that orders the replacement, and the device is wiped within the hour. Each loss is logged as a data incident first and a stock loss second, and so far none has needed reporting beyond that.
Losses have not fallen. Their consequences have, which is the part within my control.
The most sensitive device in the company was not on anybody's desk. It was on a dashboard, being unlocked with a thumb in a glove.
– Serguey Shinder
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