Many people who are either laid-off from their job or simply moving to another opportunity often secretly take proprietary data from their employer on their way out the door, a study released this week found.

Nearly 60 percent of employees who quit a job or are asked to leave are stealing company data, according to report by the Ponemon Institute, a Tucson based research group. The survey was based on interviews with 945 adults who were laid off, fired or changed jobs in the last year.

Seventy-nine percent of those who admitted to taking data said they did so despite knowing that their former employer did not permit them to take internal company information.

Sixty-five percent of those who took data from their former employer grabbed e-mail lists. The next most frequently stolen data included non-financial business information (45 percent), customer contact lists (39 percent), employee records (35 percent) and financial information (16 percent).

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