Channel Isles cop sacked after abusing police database to track down women drivers for Instagram 'comic' page A police constable has been sacked after reportedly tracking down young women motorists through their car numberplates and propositioning them on social media. Stephen Woods, formerly of Guernsey Police, was dismissed from the Channel Island’s local force after searching for their car registration details to find their names …
Essentially, how does someone like that think that they should be in the police force? And how did they get the job in the first place? The problem is not the police - it's the corporate police management who are not doing their jobs and not bothering creating a decent working environment where not being evil is the most important factor.
The problem it illustrates is our private data is not safe and never can be. It will always get out there to be misused if it is collated and stored no matter what checks and balances are in place.
I am not saying registration numbers and the owners address should not be stored and accessible to the police. I am referring to the drive of the state to collect more and more information from cameras to browsing history on the public who have not actually committed a crime. Any data stored has to be accessible by someone and if it is accessible it is not safe.
Now its bad enough the state collects and stores this data. But to allow private companies like Google and Facebook to name just a few to do this and profile you, this should be illegal.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, total bollocks. Everybody has something to hide not just villains.
Did his beat include patrolling the sun-kissed sandy beaches of the Island?
It's surprising how many police constables end up with a criminal record. They are supposed to work to a high standard, but they are usually at a moral standard below the average person. See the YouTube channel "Police Abusing Powers" for many many other examples of police abusing their authority and the law.
See the YouTube channel "Police Abusing Powers" for many many other examples of police abusing their authority and the law.
And see the Stanford Prison Experiment for why.
It is more correct to say that some of its findings are controversial, since there is not a consensus amongst research psychologists. The main issue is that the study was done once, terminated early and can never be repeated in an academic setting, at least in a civilized country, because ethical approval is now mandatory for human experimentation in academia. Consequently criticisms cannot be addressed by repeating it with a modified protocol.
Recent attempts to emulate it have been geared towards things like reality TV etc which don't require ethical approval, and lack scientific rigour since their goal is entertainment, for example this one. Incidentally, this particular emulation was also stopped because of the effect on participants.
But you don't really need a psychology experiment to observe that if one group of people is given more or less limitless power over another group of people without adequate oversight, then the results are often unpleasant. Particularly as square pegs gravitate towards square holes when it comes to making career decisions. See the torture and prisoner abuse by members of the US 372nd Military Police Company in Abu Ghraib for a relatively recent example.
>The main issue is that the study was done once, terminated early and can never be repeated in an academic setting
Or that it was done by a group of 1960s Californian students who were told that the purpose of the experiment was to show how brutal prison was in order to force reform.
It's like having a group of CND campaigners in an experiment demonstrate that they would be willing to use nukes in a war game - and so we must ban them.
The Stanford Prison experiment proved and proves nothing, except that one particular group of people behaved in one particular way on one particular occasion. That psychology affords it the slightest credibility shows why the who field has a catastrophic replication crisis.
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"In the mainland UK, his behaviour would have been in breach of the Data Protection Act 2018."
In the UK, his police department could (probably would) have been found to be in breach of the DPA 2018 on the basis of failure to protect the data from misuse (insufficient organisational measures), but as he was apparently acting as an individual, not as an independent business, DPA 2018 might well not apply to him directly as it could be argued that his activities were performed "in the course of a purely personal [...] activity". He could, however, have been charged under the Computer Misuse Act, a piece of legislation that has been far too infrequently brought to bear ever since it was first enacted.
Regarding CMA (and unlike the recent drama in the US) the situation is roughly that authorised access being abused for unauthorised purposes isn't covered by the act and the precedent is almost an carbon copy of this case involving police, numberplates and creepin: https://swarb.co.uk/director-of-public-prosecutions-v-bignell-and-another-qbd-6-jun-1997/
The judges in that case apparently said the (weaker 1984) DPA should have been used instead. The 'purely personal or household activity' exemption relates to *processing* of data (and anyway I think only of general data, not the separate category of law enforcement data). I don't think it's an exemption from the obtaining data offences. It's probably also arguable that abusing a work database using authorisation give to someone in a professional role isn't a purely personal activity.
Certainly you'd hope the ICO would go after police force for allowing it to happen though.
Sorry to play the pedant, but this isn't right. While the force may well have also breached GDPR/UK GDPR/DPA '18, there is also a specific offence under s170 of the DPA '18 of obtaining personal data without the permission of the data controller (likely the force in this case), which is what the article refers to. Conversely, the Computer Misuse Act 1990 probably wouldn't apply since the officer in question was authorised to use the system, and the essence of the offences under that Act is _unauthorised_ access, rather than abuse of access which _is_ authorised.
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