Two UK police have been reprimanded by the country’s data protection regulator after secretly recording over 200,000 calls with victims, witnesses and suspected perpetrators of crimes.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said Surrey Police and Sussex Police could face fines of typically £1m ($1.2m) for illegal, unfair and often unnecessary collection of personal data. said it would be punished.
But regulators are experimenting with new approaches to public sector enforcement, focusing on public reprimands for financial penalties.
For more on police data privacy failures, ICO blames the Metropolitan Police Department for data snafu.
The problem came from using an app that records all incoming and outgoing calls. ICO claimed that his 1,015 staff members of the two units downloaded the app to their work phones and automatically saved recordings of hundreds of thousands of calls.
The police officer using the app was apparently unaware that all calls were being recorded, and thus the interviewees were not notified. In other words, he was unable to provide consent for personal information collected during the call.
“People have the right to expect that the information they disclose will be handled responsibly when speaking to police officers. We can only estimate the sheer amount of personal data that has been collected,” argued Stephen Bonner, ICO Deputy Commissioner for Regulatory Enforcement.
“This case should serve as a lesson for organizations planning to introduce apps, products or services that use people’s personal data. Organizations should consider people’s data protection rights and We need to implement the principle of protection.”
In fact, after becoming available in 2016, the app was initially intended for use by only a few police officers, but Surrey and Sussex Police decided to distribute it to all officers. It seems that
It wasn’t until 2020 that ICOs became aware of this situation. The app is no longer in use, and most records have been destroyed, except those believed to contain important evidence.
