While mobile phone coverage isn't perfect - as noted by small and medium-sized businesses in recent Quocirca research - there's still NO NEED TO SHOUT. However a train journey this week once again highlighted to me the risks many businesses take when employees use mobile phones in public places.

Overhearing two separate conversations, it was clear that in both cases a contract was being negotiated. Large sums involved, and a glance at paperwork on the table disclosed the name of one of the parties. Trying to concentrate with the loud conversation was proving impossible, and even with no attempt to eavesdrop it would be difficult to avoid hearing the commercial details.

Not only is it insensitive to surrounding passengers - who incidentally now know which company's salespeople make the most noise, and therefore perhaps which to avoid - but it also demonstrates a lack of commercial sensitivity or propriety. In times of hardening markets, careless talk costs profits, and employees should be reminded that their personal responsibility to security is not only about hanging on to the technology hardware - mobile phones, laptops etc - they carry (government departments take note of that one too please), but keeping the flow of information secure too. That means boring old-fashioned stuff like paper and telephone calls.

It would be churlish to suggest that mobile use should be constrained - excepting perhaps the odd ringtone - but a "think before you bellow" message wouldn't go amiss. Perhaps too many loud mobile phone users come from a generation whose first mobile telephony device involved baked bean cans and string?

By Rob Bamforth