Although the iPod may have been designed for entertainment purposes, it can also be used for other things as well. The data storage facility on an iPod is basically a computer drive that can house information, just like a USB stick or external hard-drive. It’s for this reason that many companies, particularly those that are heavily involved in the IT sector, actually ban their employees from using iPods on the premises.

A construction company in Bangalore recently lost a multimillion-pound tender to a rival because of a leak involving one of their employees who used an iPod to download their tender documents and give them to the rival bidder.

The company discovered this through an investigation and was able to retrieve the data that was stored on the MP3 player, even though it had been deleted.

Another company in the IT field recently faced a similar problem when they had source code to one of their applications stolen using an iPod.

Murali Mohan, the advocate representing the IT firm stated:

We thought iPod was used only to download and listen songs, but as an external storage device holding any file type, iPods or other MP3 players have storage capacity between 1 GB and 80 GB. That is sometimes more disk space than conventional PCs. iPods can be easily misused.

Many companies are blind to the storage potential of the iPod, and despite banning devices such as USB drives and laptop computers from their premises, frequently allow iPods to be brought in.