Hi HN,

I wanted to know which countries you can simply leave your laptop at a Starbucks, and where you can't.

Feel free to click and vote.

Interesting, the map author marked Crimea as part of Russia, but for some reason doesn't mark 4 other Ukranian regions as Russian. Cannot choose the right side?

Voting on a country level here is too coarse, this poll is invalid.

I live in Vietnam and I can see it's getting colored red already but that's unfair.

If you're in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi, then for sure you couldn't safely leave your laptop in a cafe. But if youuuUse the edit icon to pin, add or delete clips.'re in a smaller town then you'll be fine. But doesn't that apply to basically every country?

I assume that the majority of people voting here are in one of the big cities and it's coloring the results. But what it really means is that English speakers are clustered in the places where it's not safe, not that the whole country is unsafe.

On the other hand, I see Vietnam is currently green for walkable and that's hilarious, it's one of the least walkable countries in the world. Pavements here are places to do business/park motorbikes, not to mention the heat makes it highly uncomfortable. There's a ratio of ~2 motorbikes per person, nobody walks here.

There was a time you could leave your valuables in most teashops in the UK and they would be safe.

Not no more. We lost our high trust society in most places.

in korea u can literally leave ur wallet, laptop, expensive bag at your table and go eat lunch or do something else for an hr and come back and it'll still be there (and people are used to it). one of the few places that surprised me more than japan lol.

but dont leave ur bike or umbrella out.

> Verification not ready, try again.

Japan is trusted enough to leave laptops in but not trusted enough to vote :/

Something similar is the lost wallet test:

https://reddit.com/r/europe/comments/ijboze/study_of_civic_h... source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aau8712

https://web.archive.org/web/20190327101602/https://www.rd.co...

Which is it? A random coffee shop or a Starbucks.

In the USA, I could leave my laptop at a small town coffee shop without any trouble, but never a Starbucks, which are only in larger towns and cities.

For the US this really needs to broken down by state and even county. I know places were you can leave valuables with little likelihood of them being stolen and places where they would be gone in seconds. Small towns where most people know each other are very different to large cities.

The map on the website has a few mistakes. The wrong border on Ukraine, for example.

You should probably find a proper e-waste collector, but I guess if you can't find one, you could leave it at Starbucks and someone will take care of it?

Australian here, and the differing wording on the site kind of changes my answer. I believe I 'can' but also that I 'wouldn't'.

I'm not worried about theft, but see 'reserving' a seat like that as rude, and 10 minutes as longer than is reasonable.

(Pragmatically – I’m more concerned about having an awkward interaction with a barista that cleared the table and put the laptop somewhere, than about someone stealing the laptop)

The page won't verify me as a human if I try to vote, I don't know why.

I voted "yes" for Antarctica, because that is the only place I'm confident about.

But seriously, I don't think this website solves the problem of knowing "which countries you can simply leave your laptop at a Starbucks, and where you can't".

It's just a rough indicator of percepted crime rate among a nation.

its not just country-level, its city-size level too. lived in a town of 5k where everyone knew each other's cars, left my bike unlocked for weeks. moved to a city of 500k and someone took a jacket from a bar stool in 20 minutes. the variable is population density and how many repeat faces you see

Might be more effective if this was by postal code instead of by entire country

I've seen people leave purses unattended in japan in a fast food restaurant while going to the bathroom.

amazing (and kind of uplifting)

Good to see 4 scientists in Antarctica felt safe enough to leave their Mac.

It's a tricky one as I've left my laptop in Glasgow, London, Tokyo, Seoul, and Berlin. I would say ancedotally they are all of varying levels of safety on the whole as a city, but it depends on the situation and judging it correctly. The only time I've ever had my phone or any piece of tech stolen was in Japan, which many would think was safer.

Canada is currently at 31%, and I call BS. Some of us have this self-image of a country where people trust each other, but that doesn't make it true.

On one hand, I dropped my brand new iPhone 4 (whatever year that was) at a concert, and it was waiting for me at the bar. Multiple people did the right thing in that particular case.

On the other hand, I've had a backpack and camera stolen. I've even had toilet paper stolen while I was loading my car (during COVID). I've worked in offices where laptops have been stolen. Everyone has a story like this.

I mean, I wouldn't leave an unattended laptop anywhere. Maybe the real test is "if you had forgotten your laptop at a coffee shop for ten minutes, what probability would you assign to going back there and successfully recovering it?".

For Greece, it would be pretty high, but I wouldn't just randomly leave a laptop, because the off chance of something happening is still not worth the trouble.

Why? Stop reserving public or publicly available spots. I you leave anything from laptop to beach towel unattended for longer than 5 minutes you're an asshole.

"Verification not ready, try again"

I had my phone fell from my pocket while in a dancing club at night. Someone found it, took it to the bartender and I got it back (saw the location on my computer using Google's find your phone).

But would I deliberately leave my phone or laptop unattended on the table at a random coffee shop that I know nothing about? Probably fine but not taking that risk. Also as others pointed out, context matters. A small indoor coffee shop while I visit the toilet? No problem. Large crowded outside terrace? I'm not stupid.