Confidential lost & found tags help protect users’ things

TurlyTag is a system of hard tags and stickers that lets users label their things without giving out personal details, using unique codes to identify the owners of lost items.

It used to be that protecting one’s stuff meant putting a name or phone number on it somewhere. Today, however, many consumers would rather not expose such potentially sensitive information. As a result, there’s TurlyTag, a system of hard tags and stickers that lets users label their things without giving out personal details. Similar in many ways to Canadian Oliver’s Labels for kids’ things, TurlyTag’s stickers and tags use unique codes rather than personal information to identify the owners of lost items. Consumers simply sign up with the service and provide all the contact details they’d like to use. Then, they put tags on the items they want to protect. In the event that any labeled item gets lost, the finder can contact TurlyTag which, in turn, can contact the item’s owner via phone, SMS or email and arrange for the item to be returned. Pricing begins at USD 5 per month for seven hard tags and seven stickers. Some 50,000 laptops are lost at the top 36 airports every month, but 64 percent of them are never claimed; in fact, the majority of consumers believe they have no way to get such lost items back, Rhode Island-based TurlyTag says. Time to set up a similar service in your neck of the woods? Spotted by: Jordan Price