A friend of mine has a job that takes him to the local recycling centre. Computers are handled separately, hopefully to avoid identity theft from data left on hard drives. But recently there has been a marked increase in the number of PDAs, phones and iPods being junked.

These smart devices have huge solid state or hard disk stores and most people don't think what secrets they are giving away when they junk this stuff.

Local councils do not yet seem to have woken up to the need to route pocket computers through secure channels - if necessary, just a man with a hammer.

But I guess they will, perhaps after a politician has junked a Blackberry. Even the companies selling the stuff seem blissfully ignorant of the risks.

I borrowed a Joggler from cellphone company O2 [a digital photo frame with internet connectivity], writing in magazines including ERT [August 27, 2009] that the device had potential, but was not yet up to speed.

Six months on, there is still no clear business model for the Joggler, which is the first device sold by O2 that does not generate a revenue stream. Some of the promised features have not yet been implemented. For instance, the internet radio option offers only a restricted choice of stations (no LBC News or Jazz FM), no foreign stations and a confusing direction to the Pure Lounge internet portal, which the Joggler can't access.

I never did get the promised explanation from O2 as to why the Joggler reads some USB sticks, but not others with identical FAT formatting. I don't see Jogglers in stores or advertised and, perhaps significantly, O2 won't give out any sales figures.

So when O2 asked for my Joggler back, I certainly wasn't going to offer to pay to keep it. So it went back to O2 with a reminder that whoever now uses it will need some sticky tape to hold in the faulty DC power plug.

Before it went back, I asked O2 for the recommended way to wipe the system clean of my personal data - contacts and messages I had entered for the SMS messaging service that comes free with the Joggler.

"Settings>Factory Reset will delete your information from the Joggler," an O2 spokeswoman assured me.

Does it heck! A factory reset does not delete contacts or stored messages. This has to be done manually and if I had not been a suspicious soul and checked, and then manually deleted everything, my contacts and messages would have been passed on to whomever gets it next.

And doing a factory reset does not stop messages arriving because the Joggler retains its unique SMS ID number, so I will now have to try and tell anyone who might send me a personal message not to do so because some unknown third party will read it.

I suggested to O2's PR officer that the company should be aware of these data protection risks. A week on and O2 has not commented. Which is worrying. If companies the size of O2 Telefonica (motto: "We're better, connected") don't take security seriously, what hope does the consumer have?

Barry Fox