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It Takes a Village to find a Phone
By Trevor Valescu | September 10, 2017
May 2006, a woman named Ivanna leaves her phone in a New York City cab. It was a Sidekick, one of the newer phones of that decade. She desperately called the cab company once she had learned of its disappearance to no avail. It contained all the information for a wedding she was having, so it was important to her that she got it back. After days had passed, with no response, she caved and bought herself a new phone. The phone company was kind enough to give her all her info back. When she got her info back, she discovered who had ended up with her phone. She began messaging the person to try and get them to return the phone, but they stubbornly refused repeatedly. Evan, Ivanna’s friend, decided to set up a website titled, Stolen Sidekick, and used it as a platform for his friends to spread the news and find the criminal responsible for stealing Ivanna’s phone. The attention his site attained grew so large that the New York Times wrote an article about it, bringing the story to national attention. Now the NYPD couldn’t ignore it any longer and was forced to investigate. This whole media fire began as a simple search for a phone, but became a staple example of how far the internet has allowed us to reach others that we couldn’t have imagined ten years before this occurred.
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