Do you often request phone numbers from people who you believe will run off with your phone right in front of you? This seems more like a terrible inconvenience than a risk to your property.
Run off? No. Have them peek at my email? Maybe. Have them see a notification popup? Maybe. Have them accidentally lock phone and try to unlock it with wrong code? Maybe. I hand a phone to someone, get distracted and lose track of them for a few minutes? Maybe.
I suppose there isn't much you could do about that, aside from getting distracted, but that's stressful having to worry about it every time you hand your phone off to get a new contact. As another commenter suggested though, people do this already when getting people to enter in their own details. All in all, I think the idea of having to hand your phone off sucks regardless of possible privacy or theft issues.
Well sure, but lets work off a real example. Are we talking about gangsters in south central Los Angeles, Nigerian scammers, start-up folk at a conference in Las Vegas, a co-worker (in any part of the world)?
There are many people who you would or would not feel comfortable with handing your phone to while they tapped away right in front of you. My only suggestion here is that the people we usually ask for contact information from are usually the people we instill some very basic level of trust in -- that they wouldn't jack us right in front of our faces. Usually.
Conferences, where most people are strangers and there to swap contact info. And of course bars and clubs and conference parties... an attractive woman or man wants to give your drunken self their contact info! Woot!
And that's not even what I was really thinking of... in poor countries the last thing you want to do is pull out a smartphone, let alone pass it to the doctor, tour guide, taxi driver or whoever you think is standing in front of you.
If you don't even want to pull the phone out to begin with then you're most likely not hitting them up for their phone number unless they happen to have a card or you happen to have a pen and sticky notes.
It's possible that the people who are already too cautious to even reveal that they have a phone are the same people that would never make use of a service like this.
My mom actually had to help someone who had their phone stolen in this fashion. In the women's restroom at the county fair, she csme across someone who was in need of some sort of medical assistance. This somewhat incapacitated woman handed her phone to another woman with instructions to call for help. This second woman then simply ran off with the phone, and shortly after my mom happened by.
I can tell that all you've gathered from my comments was the words "run off." Your story isn't exactly related to what we're talking about though, at all, considering the person in that story was incapacitated. Weird though, poor lady.
