Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

NYT has a heart warming story on how people are using cyberspace to to return lost valuables to the original owners.

Rhonda Surman and her husband were hiking around some Bronze Age ruins in western Scotland last year when they glimpsed sunlight reflecting off burnished metal. It was an Olympus digital camera, lying on the ground.

The couple turned the camera over to the local police, but eight weeks later it was returned to them, unclaimed.

Ms. Surman, who lives in northern Scotland, did not give up. There were 600 pictures on the camera’s memory card, including some from a wedding and a couple’s European travels. Ms. Surman posted several of them on the Internet and, in the next few months, organized a group of amateur detectives who traced clues in the photos, leading them back to the camera’s stunned and delighted owner.

“I don’t think I’m nicer than anyone else,” she said, “but I thought the pictures showed a honeymoon. That was the bit that made me try harder.”

Plenty of people like Ms. Surman are acting on the same impulse these days and embracing a new role: digital Samaritan. The Internet may allow bad guys to stalk people or steal their identities. But it also makes it easier to give something back, because of sites and tools that can help people reunite strangers with lost valuables like wallets, cellphones and cameras.

Bravo!