Brit cops rapped over app that recorded 200k phone calls Several police forces in Britain are being put on the naughty step by the UK's data watchdog for using a calling app that recorded hundreds of thousands of phone conversations and illegally retained that data. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said today it was made aware in June 2020 that Surrey Police and Sussex …
I wouldn't be surprised if police are doing the same with CCTV camera footage and standard commercial facial recognition apps, uploading images of 'friends' (potential suspects) to 'name' those in the CCTV stills/footage, and sort to content automatically.
This in itself should be an ICO investigation, because it's something is that is clearly possible with the technology available, so it's likely been used, and it's totally unregulated and unauthorised use of the technology, because of the potential for false-positives.
Why do these type of public disclosures always have to result in a complaint first, the potential compensation payments for this are massive.
Regulators need to start getting pre-emptive, so this doesn't happen in the first place.
Sadly crippled by the Chocolate Factory. Unless any regtards know better, there is now no call recording for Android (or iOS) ?
PITA as it was one of the few reasons for using a mobile to make calls.
Now running a VOIP app to allow call recording. Because it's always useful to head off the "you can't prove that" line of corporate denial with
Me: "let's listen to your call recording"
Them: "That could take up to 28 days, and we may not have recorded that conversation".
Me: "No problem, let's listen to mine then"
IANAL, but I understand that in the UK it's perfectly legal to record telephone conversations without disclosing that you are doing so. There are limits to what you can do with those recordings, although if you make all parties aware beforehand ("This call may be recorded for Training & Monitoring purposes..."), then those limits are reduced.
There's no legal basis for crippling this functionality in the UK (or in many other jurisdictions, presumably), but Google decided to force this change on the entire world just to play it safe.
In the UK, it is legal provided one of the parties to the call is aware it is being recorded. If you are recording your own calls, then you are a party to the call and you know you are doing it, so it is legal. If you installed the software on a family member's phone, or an employee's phone, and they didn't know it was there, then it would be illegal.
You are right in a way. It *is* legal, but *both* parties need to be aware that they are being recorded, and the purpose of that recording.. This is why when you call some tech support or sales lines, before you even speak to a human, you are sometimes told that your call may be recorded for training purposes (or whatever purpose it may be used for).
The Data protection regulations also require that the recordings be held securely, and only be stored as long as they are needed for., and stored within the European Union, or a country with equivalent Data Protection regulations.
https://www.ereceptionist.co.uk/blog/legal-to-record-phone-calls-uk#:~:text=Yes%2C%20it%20is%20legal%20to,is%20for%20their%20own%20use.
Recording personal calls and recording business (or in this case police) calls are very different things.
This story is about calls recorded by police officers and police employees in the course of their business and nothing to do with personal calls. So introducing a moan about not being able to record personal calls is entirely irrelevant.
FWIW Google have not crippled call recording for the entire planet and even if they happed to have done so in your territory there are plenty of apps around which allow you to record calls.
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I've just scoured the Play Store (in the UK) and noticed that all of the "apps" have some bad feedback - mainly about not working.
A colleague has just noticed that his Samsungs inbuilt phone app (as promoted by Google) also doesn't do call recording.
It's starting to look a lot like "mate said"
There are limits to what you can do with those recordings, although if you make all parties aware beforehand ("This call may be recorded for Training & Monitoring purposes...")
I suppose those whose calls the OP would want to record would already have made that announcement so just make sure that's included in your own recording.
The way the police force is telling it it just seems to have happened spontaneously.; nobody made a decision.
Well, it may be true that nobody made and informed decision but that was lack of due diligence.
It's no good just reprimanding the force although this is the appropriate procedure for a public body. The expectation should be that having been reprimanded the public body will take career-affecting disciplinary action against whoever landed them in that situation however far up the command chain that goes. And far up the command chain is very probably appropriate because that's where the organisational culture will have been set. Sacegoating wouldn't be appropriate Without consequences there's no assurance that things will be done right, just an assumption.
The likelihood, of course, is that it'll be reported that whoever was to have been disciplined has retired.
200k telephone calls recorded and nobody noticed the log files filling up, and the backup tapes filling up?
Oh, hang on, we've graduated from 1/2 inch reel-to-reel tape drives haven't we?
As for anyone in a UK Police Force actually being disciplined, I mean, L O L, that's a good one, made me chuckle.
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You are spot on and sadly this happens all the time...
People employed to ride the publicly funded gravy train rarely if ever face the consequences of their misconduct and/or incompetence.
In cases where there is a lot of public dissatisfaction the response is to launch a public which takes an inordinately long time and again costs the taxpayers a fortune. And the result is usually:
- we're very sorry for the inconvenience
- we know we have to do better
- mistakes were made
- lessons were learned
Jobs are kept, bonuses are paid, and on we go...until the next ****-up
"The police officers were themselves unaware that calls would be recorded and so were the people on the other end of the line"
The police officers didn't know that an app with "call recorder" in the name would record calls? In which case plod are more stupid than most people think. However I think that in this case it's the regulator who is being dumb, I'm sure the police knew the calls were being recorded, but were ignorant of the fact that it would be a breach of more than one regulation. Ignorance is however no excuse in law - as I am sure PC plod is well aware.
In other words, this is what always happens.
1. Police see a shiny thing.
2. Police use the shiny thing with no guidance or framework whatsoever, trusting that...
3. The Home Office will change the law as appropriate if it turns out there's some problem with the shiny thing when it's uncovered two years down the line.
Does anyone else feel like the "used on 432 phones and 1024 officers downloaded the app" and it also says 1015 staff downloaded and used the app? So that would mean that it was used by 2471 phones/devices? All of them, recording everything?
Why is the person who deployed this not responsible directly? It was an accident? That they didn't do their job properly and know the software they were deploying to thousands of staff? Whoever selected this program and no doubt RAMMED it through needs their own ramming.
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Australia and the Australian states have fairly strict restrictions on call recording, that don't seem to have any exemptions for the police. Apps like ACR are generically not legal.
Yet when an acquaintance called a police station, the call was silently recorded, and available to the courts. There seems to be some kind of 'police exemption' here, precisely because conversations are with "victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of suspected crimes". ( I never found the legislation that authorizes it.)
I have a fair bit of trouble seeing much wrong with the police recording calls to the station.
It has long been recognised by those of use who regularly attend Mensa soirees, that calling the cops to report that some of your drugs were nicked (but luckily not the ones hidden in my guitar case), won't turn out well.
It is clear that a an equity issue, the police should be obliged to provide a special toll free number for those who have a government issued, mentally challenged person ID.
You must be LEO affiliated to think that it should be in any way acceptable for law enforcement to break the law. If what you suggest is true, then why isn't there a statutory exemption in place in this regard? Citizen right mean precious little already, you think we should just stop pretending they exist at all?
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