This is good news if it's enforced. Digital stripsearching (as it's known) plus a deep dive into the complainants' personal records and information has been an open injustice for far too long.
UK investigators told to stop mass collection of personal data in rape cases
Information commissioner says indiscriminate gathering of details is undermining trust in justice system
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In a report, published on Tuesday, the ICO says the current approach is undermining trust and confidence in the criminal justice system and re-victimising complainants, who can be subjected to a far greater level of interrogation about their personal information than the suspects they accuse.
John Edwards, the UK information commissioner, said: “We’ve got to this position now that when somebody fronts up and makes a complaint about serious sexual assault, they have a form stuck in front of them saying: ‘Please authorise us to access any information we want’ and they [the police or prosecutors] are just not exercising the thoughtfulness and discipline we would expect and they’re going off on these quite wide fishing expeditions.
“We think these practices are widespread and they need to change and we’ve sort of put some stakes in the ground for investigators so that they understand what the limits are of their ability to investigate. What we’re saying is: ‘Here are the rules and if you don’t comply with those, we will come back with an enforcement hat on.’”
www.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/31/uk-investigators-told-to-stop-mass-collection-of-personal-data-in-rape-cases
Feminism: chat
UK investigators told to stop mass collection of personal data in rape cases
EmbarrassingHadrosaurus · 31/05/2022 09:24
TheTonEffect · 27/06/2022 13:03
Re the seizure of victim's and suspect's phones - the suspect is likely to delete anything incriminatory from his phone. Although you can sometimes recover deleted data it's not a certainty as the phone will overwrite the old deleted files with new ones after a certain point. That can be a reason why victims are also asked to provide their phones - to provide the evidence. Services like WhatsApp are encrypted so you cannot request the messages from the company.
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