UK police forces spark privacy concerns over use of AI to deal with digital evidence

Cellebrite, a Japanese-owned company, claims that a roll-out of the technology would solve problems with failures to disclose digital evidence, which have been highlighted in recent months after the collapse of a number of rape trials in England.

But the move has led to concerns over privacy and the software’s potential to lead to a bias in evidence handling.

Cellebrite said that it has been working with a dozen police forces but was only able to name the Metropolitan Police. It cannot name the others due to commercial non-dsiclosure agreements that are in place.

A system sold by the company, Analytics Enterprise, allows users to visualise social networks and add data from multiple phones to determine when people were in the same place at the same time.

Algorithms allow images and videos to be tagged for particular content including nudity, drugs and weapons.

“Police officers are under mountains of cases they have to investigate and they don’t have the time or knowledge to go through everything,” said David Golding of Cellebrite.

Millie Graham Wood, a solicitor at Privacy International, said: “What implication does this have for people whose names come up in these communications? It will be like the gangs matrix used by police. There are huge issues with the databases the police hold already.”

Corey Stoughton, advocacy director at Liberty, commented: “Once again police forces appear to be secretly adopting radical new technology that threatens our privacy and digital security, without any democratic oversight or debate. The home secretary must stop allowing police forces to ‘trial’ potentially harmful technologies without first allowing parliament and the public a say.”