Britain’s data regulator mentioned on Tuesday it had reprimanded two police forces for recording over 200,000 cellphone calls, probably with victims, witnesses and perpetrators of suspected crimes, with out individuals’s data.

The Info Commissioner’s Workplace (ICO) mentioned the reprimand was issued to Surrey Police and Sussex Police, following the roll-out of an app in 2016 that recorded cellphone conversations and unlawfully captured private information.

The police forces didn’t instantly reply to Reuters’ requests for a remark.

The ICO mentioned it turned conscious in 2020 that employees members throughout each police forces had entry to the app which recorded all incoming and outgoing cellphone calls.

The app was downloaded by 1,015 employees members and greater than 200,000 recordings of cellphone conversations had been robotically saved, the regulator mentioned.

“We will solely estimate the large quantity of non-public information collected throughout these conversations, together with extremely delicate data referring to suspected crimes,” ICO Deputy Commissioner for Regulatory Supervision Stephen Bonner mentioned within the assertion.

“This case needs to be a lesson realized to any organisation planning to introduce an app, services or products that makes use of individuals’s private information. Organisations should contemplate individuals’s information safety rights and implement information safety ideas from the very begin.”