A new UK law will explicitly authorise the "voluntary" slurping of data from mobile phones of crime suspects and witnesses.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which was introduced to Parliament this week, contains clauses that will allow police and others to extract data from mobile phones if the user "voluntarily" hands the device over.
Although it seems counterintuitive, the move comes after headlines in years gone by of police accessing excessive amounts of data from the phones of people who handed them over.
The most pointed criticism came from privacy pressure group Big Brother Watch, which insisted that victims of sexual assault were submitting to "digital strip searches" [PDF, 60 pages] as a result of cooperating with police investigators.
"Victims who do give blanket consent to these ..
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