Police wouldn’t give victim’s stolen phone back over ‘burglar’s GDPR’ rights
https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/north-wales-police-wouldnt-give-30938824
Posted by LuinAelin
Police wouldn’t give victim’s stolen phone back over ‘burglar’s GDPR’ rights
https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/north-wales-police-wouldnt-give-30938824
Posted by LuinAelin
29 Comments
This is the police being lazy, not doing their job properly, then floundering for an excuse again, isn’t it?
Just how they tried to blame “being worried they might be called racist” when they didn’t bother investigating the grooming gangs.
I would invoice the police a daily fee for keeping my phone.
It would be utterly unenforceable but it would be enough to get the case before a judge.
Looks as though the victim did get their phone back from the judge though.
By the way, that article was written by AI.
So the guy had his phone stolen. The thief was making use of it, so when he was finally caught, the police wouldn’t return the phone to the victim as it would infringe the rights of the criminal to data protection.
Absolutely shocking? Yes.
Surprising?…….
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It surely isn’t a GDPR violation to voluntarily input your personal data into someone else’s computer. What a dumb ass excuse.
There is probably more to this than the press are being told. I gather the case is still finalising so maybe plod are mining info on the crims chums?
They wouldn’t really say that would they? Also, the GDPR argument is bollocks – the police are not the data holder, ironically the owner of the phone is and would get shit if they used the crims data without their consent. The police are an interested party but its who owns the phone is responsible. The police have a duty to keep it safe under their care.
Interesting.
>Judge Jones asked if Mr Wainwaring was having difficulties having his phone returned “because of GDPR”. The prosecutor Mr McLoughlin replied: “I do not know. It would not surprise me.”
I can just imagine the prosecutor’s big sigh before he replied haha.
Misleading headline.
In the article, the Judge throws out ‘GDPR’ as a hypothetical suggestion that the phone was not being returned, the police department involved do not ever indicate that as such.
More likely is that it is being retained as evidence for connected crimes as the offender’s data is currently on the phone.
Be exceptionally wary of any newspaper that is friendly to big tech pointing to ‘GDPR’ as the reason for a problem. GDPR is a powerful piece of pro-consumer legislation that gives owners of personal data more control over their privacy and how their data is used, including the right to have it removed from a company’s data storage.
Tech oligarchs HATE GDPR because it gives them less control over YOU.
I work relatively close to the GDPR team in my organisation and it’s pretty clear with various articles that the majority of people have no clue about what GDPR does and doesn’t do so use it as an excuse all the time to get out of doing something.
Under GDPR, you can consent to data collection and processing. Implicit consent is also fine. If you’re knowingly using a stolen phone you can expect that it will be returned to its rightful owner at some point, so you’re implicitly consenting to giving the rightful owner any personal data that you put in to it. Therefore there is no issue returning the phone as the burglar has already consented to that data being handed over.
That’d be my argument, anyway.
The police wouldn’t even return a brand new USB that I provided once with footage of an incident at a store as evidence. They wouldn’t accept an online upload. It had to be on a physical medium.
At the time, I asked if they could provide their own USB, and they said no. I then asked whether the USB would be returned to me and was told that it would be. Obviously, nothing came back.
Apparently, providing evidence is meant to cost someone £5 each time? Why even bother?
Before you all go asking for the GDPRs removal, the police could easily remove the data from the device if this was actually a concern. This is an attempt to outrage us into giving away more of our rights.
An absolutely moronic misinterpretation of GDPR.
The police in this situation were not the data controller for data held on the phone. They weren’t even data processors.
GDPR is basically used for two purposes:
1. To jam up competitors with spurious requests.
2. To give feckless jobsworths an excuse not to do their jobs.
I legit had some bellend tell me that they couldn’t tell me what reference they had on file for a non-existent electric meter, as if my electric meter’s reference number was some how personal to me.
Of course it’s north Wales police, absolutely useless fuckwits, every time I’ve had to deal with them.
The most recent was when my dad died a couple of weeks ago, couldn’t praise the paramedics enough, but the police? Not only did it take them an hour to turn up after being notified, when they did come they wouldn’t speak to me, you know the guy that found him? And then when they offered to inform a family member they later phoned me to say actually I’d have to do it.
To top it all off when the coroner’s report came out the idiot officer I was dealing with couldn’t even manage to attach a pdf to an email, so I had to chase him up to get him to do it properly.
When i had my house burgled and my laptop stolen the police pleaded with me to let them keep it for a few days. I imagine they needed it to photograph and entered as evidence and a number of other things.
Seeing as they caught the dirty bastard i couldn’t say no. It was back in a day or two though
Not sure how true or not this is. It’s irrelevant to my point but I do think GDPR should be updated to say that if someone uses someone else’s device or account in a way that is not allowed they forfeit the right to their own data from the illicit activities.
A few odd examples here to draw the distinction:
– You let you friend use your phone. They log into their reddit account and forget to sign out. You don’t have rights to their data here as you let them use your phone.
– Your bank account is hacked and fraudulent transactions are made. The bank knows who it is but won’t tell you because of GDPR. That wouldn’t be allowed under my framework as you hadn’t authorised them to use your account so their data is fair game.
The headline and the opening paragraphs of this article are bullshit.
The comment which the entire story is built around is buried half way down the article:
> Judge Jones asked if Mr Wainwaring was having difficulties having his phone returned. “because of GDPR”. The prosecutor Mr McLoughlin replied: “**I do not know. It would not surprise me.**”
So the story isn’t “the police wouldn’t give the victim the phone because of GDPR rights”, the story is, “someone made a throwaway comment about not knowing whether it was anything to do with GDPR.
The truth is so different to the reality that it seems fair to say that the article is a lie.
I’m starting to think that UK cops are just morons who have an excuse ready for every negligent act
It boggles my mind how criminals have more rights that victims
To be honest – fair enough to push this up to a judge to decide. It’s clearly technically a data protection issue which I’m sure could be figured out but specialists(a judge for example) but I wouldn’t want to be the one that gave it back and ended up sacked for not taking care of a person’s personal data.
Craven jobsworths! Also, GDPR is one of the most poorly interpreted pieces of legislation i can think of!
GDPR specifically is limited to obliging companies and institutions to protect data to a degree that only requires reasonable effort. What is reasonable can depend.
I would like to read the article, but the page is like 90% ads that take up the whole screen
Is this headline even vaguely true? The article suggests it’s not
My parents house was burgled a few years ago. It was a neighbour’s kid and it was really easy to trace him down. He sold my parents’ iPad to a dealer.
Anyway, him and the dealer get arrested and my parents’ got their iPad back.
The shocking thing was that the police didn’t wipe it and no password was set. We had access to this guy’s entire life. His social media, his contact list, dubious messages, all his photos of various incriminating natures… It was honestly crazy.
Had we been so inclined we could have legitimately ruined several lives with that information, so yeah, wipe that stuff before handing it back
The police in this country are a pathetic bunch of woke wankers
When I had my card details stolen, I knew which shops/outlets they’d used it at. They went on quite a spending spree. My bank only got suspicious when the turds got hungry (from all the shopping) and decided to go to Papa John’s. Cause it was in London (about 200 miles away), my bank texted me asking if it was me. Then obviously knew that the massive spree at Apple, Argos, Nike etc, etc, wasn’t me having a mad one.
One of them was Argos and an online order. They refused to reveal the name or address of where the rather large order was going to be delivered. They even refused to confirm it was going to be cancelled….because apparently GDPR and all that bull****. Bastards probably still got it delivered.
My first thought reading the headline is “That’s not how GDPR works,” and my second thought is “Why is ‘Burglar’s GDPR’ in speech marks but not ‘rights’?”