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U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

nytimes.com

21–30 of 131 posts

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#21
post #8

> Mr. Ephgrave, the assistant commissioner, acknowledged such concerns in his statement. > “We understand that how personal data is used can be a source of anxiety,” he said. “We would never want victims to feel that they can’t report crimes because of ‘intrusion’ in their data.” > “That’s why a new national form has been introduced,” replacing policies that varied from place to place, “to help police seek informed c…

Don't disagree with you at all but have noticed people using the phrase 'what the actual fuck' a lot lately. I can obviously infer that it's adding emphasis but it just doesn't make sense to me.

The fact that you can understand what it means indicates that it is a phrase that is entering our language.

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#23

Being a victim of a crime has always meant some loss of privacy. If you are murdered, they will conduct an autopsy of you to determine how you died and possibly a toxicology study to determine what drugs you had in your system. If you were raped, getting a rape exam done is recommended to document injuries and collect DNA samples. If you report your child was kidnapped, the police will likely closely examine your hom…

If your car is stolen, it's reasonable that your Google docs are read?

If you say your child was kidnapped, I bet that your Google docs might be read.

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#24
This seems like it will inevitably discourage victims from reporting crime. Imagine a scenario where someone is mugged but doesn't want to report it to the police because they have some texts from their weed dealer on their phone: as a result the mugger never gets reported and may mug somebody else. Not to mention the huge opportunities it creates for a kind of blackmail (criminal A commits a crime against criminal B knowing in advance that criminal B could not report criminal A without being implicated in a different crime when they hand over their digital info).

So it's easy to see how this kind of policy can counterintuitively end up increasing crime by making it easier for someone who has committed a crime to get away with it.

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#25
The point being, it would be nice to know the trial isn't going to collapse because the defense got a subpoena on the phone's contents and nobody in the prosecution had plans for what they found.

This is an artefact of the adversarial model of justice. Someone is being paid to get mister rapist, mister burglar and miss stabbity off the hook and they can and will use anything that makes you look like a liar or unreliable. Regardless if you actually are.

If the UK switched to a continental style system of judge-led discovery, this kind of fishing for anything that looks bad might become less prevalent. But that isn't presently in the offing.

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#26
post #8

> Mr. Ephgrave, the assistant commissioner, acknowledged such concerns in his statement. > “We understand that how personal data is used can be a source of anxiety,” he said. “We would never want victims to feel that they can’t report crimes because of ‘intrusion’ in their data.” > “That’s why a new national form has been introduced,” replacing policies that varied from place to place, “to help police seek informed c…

Don't disagree with you at all but have noticed people using the phrase 'what the actual fuck' a lot lately. I can obviously infer that it's adding emphasis but it just doesn't make sense to me.

So, you understand what it means, but you don't understand what it means?

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#27
post #8

> Mr. Ephgrave, the assistant commissioner, acknowledged such concerns in his statement. > “We understand that how personal data is used can be a source of anxiety,” he said. “We would never want victims to feel that they can’t report crimes because of ‘intrusion’ in their data.” > “That’s why a new national form has been introduced,” replacing policies that varied from place to place, “to help police seek informed c…

Not sure about the UK, but in the US the police have no formal duty to protect you. No matter how much warning/info/evidence they have that someone will be victimized, and no matter how easy/reasonable it is for the police to prevent it, citizens are generically not entitled to compensation for failure to be protected. Rather, the police's mission (both formally and as a functional matter) is overwhelmingly about cat…

We can always vote and legislate for something better. From my experience in the US, police vary from decent people just trying to serve society, to up-armored mall cops on power trips. If you give them assault rifles, tanks, and unlimited surveillance, you encourage the worst among them. A guy wearing a uniform and trained in de-escalation instead of "verbal control" could do some good.

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#28

The point being, it would be nice to know the trial isn't going to collapse because the defense got a subpoena on the phone's contents and nobody in the prosecution had plans for what they found. This is an artefact of the adversarial model of justice. Someone is being paid to get mister rapist, mister burglar and miss stabbity off the hook and they can and will use anything that makes you look like a liar or unrelia…

You're talking as if a trial 'collapsing' (I assume this means the accused is found not guilty) is some huge catastrophe, when in fact the possibility of such 'collapse' is the whole point of a trial.

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#29

The point being, it would be nice to know the trial isn't going to collapse because the defense got a subpoena on the phone's contents and nobody in the prosecution had plans for what they found. This is an artefact of the adversarial model of justice. Someone is being paid to get mister rapist, mister burglar and miss stabbity off the hook and they can and will use anything that makes you look like a liar or unrelia…

Hang on, the courts in England do not, cannot by law, work like that. Here's an English barrister talking about it:

https://twitter.com/BarristerSecret/status/11228239278042275...

Re: U.K. Police Have a Message for Crime Victims: Hand over Your Private Data

#30
Here's the CPS guidance being talked about: https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/handing-over-mobile-phone-da...

Here's an English barrister talking about the guidance: https://twitter.com/BarristerSecret/status/11228239278042275...

tl;dr it doesn't say what you think it says.

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