Professor Chris Reed from Queen Mary’s School of Law has written a letter to The Times in response to the proposal that victims of rape were to be asked to give up their phone data to police.
He writes: “Victims want data that is sensitive and irrelevant to remain private, while the police need all data to be potentially available for criminal investigation and a future trial. Much of this conflict could be solved by setting up a data trust. Data trusts hold data as stewards, deciding who can have access and on what terms. A data trust for these purposes would preserve data for use as future evidence, and control access to data which was irrelevant for a police investigation.”
Read the full letter here [PDF 96KB]