Don't trust a mobile phone to keep your dearest memories safe

Harsher punishments for thieves are unlikely to solve the problem

Rex Features

I have been moving house recently, and while sorting out my worldly goods, I came across an item with which anyone under 25 years of age might be unfamiliar: a photograph album. Today, it feels like a piece of outdated memorabilia, like a yo-yo or a Walkman or a LP record, but this was where memories were housed, where the stories of our lives unfolded, in the days before the mobile phone came along to compress our entire existence into an object you can hold in the palm of your hand.

Of course, the advent of mobile technology has changed every aspect of our day-to-day lives, from the way we communicate with each other and the outside world to the way we conduct our business. But it's in the storing of memories - whether they be photographs, text or voicemail messages, or indeed merely someone's details - that the potency, power and indispensability of the mobile phone is especially felt.

I used to know all the important phone numbers in my life by heart. Now, if I lost my mobile, I wouldn't have a clue how to get in touch with my nearest and dearest. Or indeed what arrangements I'd made. I'd feel insecure that no one could get in touch with me. But the loss I'd feel the keenest is undoubtedly that of my bank of photographs, of times past, of loves present and lost, of triumphs and disasters, and, yes, even of misjudged selfies. I don't think we pay enough attention to the way we have ceded power over the things we treasure the most to a piece of technology. It is, when you stop and reflect, an incredible article of trust.

And now this has been recognised by those who shape our laws. Yesterday, the Sentencing Council, which is the advisory body for judges and magistrates regarding the punishment of offenders, said that the "emotional harm" caused by the theft of a mobile phone or other electronic device should be taken into account when sentences are being handed down.

According to new guidelines, thieves will face harsher treatment if they are found guilty of taking items with "substantial value to the loser regardless of monetary worth". The Sentencing Council said: "If a phone that is stolen contains irreplaceable sentimental data, then that would be part of it". I guess that means any phone theft, then. Whose mobile doesn't contain "irreplaceable sentimental data", or, as we know them, pictures?

This is not an old man's lament for the days of the photograph, when people were much more discriminating about what they took pictures of. You couldn't just snap away with abandon: you had 36 shots on a roll of film, and you made damn sure each one was used to effect. And then you had to wait a week or so to get your photographs back. This taught us to be selective, careful and patient. Oh, well, maybe it is a lament...

More than 2,000 phones every day are stolen in England and Wales, so that's an awful lot of people walking around with that awful, empty feeling that comes from having your personal life violated. The Sentencing Council are right to apply their intellect to this unfortunate state of affairs, and to recognise that it should be enshrined in a legal framework.

Nevertheless, I am not sure that this is likely to change matters. A thief doesn't steal a mobile phone in the hope of purloining someone's holiday snaps, any more than a burglar breaks into a house and takes away photo albums. What we need to address is our own relationship with the mobile, and treat it more as a piece of life's ephemera rather than an object which has real permanence. I am guilty of this myself: I have numbers on my phone of people who are no longer with us, and I just can't bring myself to delete their details. It may be little more than phoney sentimentality, or weird superstition, but it's an expression of the fact that I regard my phone as extension of my very being. I draw the line, however, at preserving voicemail messages from the dear departed, like some people do. That's just a bit too macabre.

Anyway, there is - as you know - a simple way round all this. At regular intervals, edit the pictures on your phone, and get the ones you really love printed. And then? Yes, you've got it - put them in a photo album!