Volume of data - a help or a hindrance in the legal world?
Dame Victoria Sharp DBE, President of the Queen's Bench Division, recently gave a speech at the National Criminal Justice Conference commenting on technology and digital data challenges.
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Read Rachel Mill’s summary of the speech below for a quick overview of how Courts are highlighting the risks of digital data that is growing exponentially in complexity and volume. While presenting issues for law enforcement and the Courts in how data is handled and presented, there’s acknowledgment too that it is providing corporate cyber criminals with more opportunity for "crime, deviance and misuse".
Rachel Mills writes:
As the use of technology increases in everyday life, so does the volume of data created. It is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created every day in 2021. 90% of the data in the world was created in the last two years and moving forward, it is expected that the volume of data will double every two years.
There are two challenges with digital data and they are the volume of available data and the need for judges and jurors to understand the digital data presented to them at trial.
In her recent speech, Dame Victoria Sharp DBE, President of the Queen's Bench Division acknowledged the increasing dependence of the world and the criminal justice system on technology and the proliferation of technology and how it has changed "how individuals behave and engage with the world around them".
She commented that there are two challenges with digital data and they are the volume of available data and the need for judges and jurors to understand the digital data presented to them at trial. Very few cases are now presented to a jury without digital evidence whether that is text messages, emails or triangulation data that can place a Defendant within a known area at the time of an offence. This creates new challenges for the Police and legal teams in gathering relevant digital information, storing that information and ensuring the quality and integrity of that evidence. Unless that digital evidence can be shown to be credible, it risks failing the admissibility test and cannot be presented to the Court.
Dame Victoria Sharp also commented that the huge volume of data now presents opportunity for "crime, deviance and misuse" and that this had led to the development of new types of crime and unprecedented challenges for those investigating these new types of crimes.
It is clear that the volume of data is increasing exponentially and it is more important than ever that businesses secure their data, manage it to comply with relevant regulations and prevent criminal misuse.
