Can Smartphones Be Used As Criminal Evidence?- Click here http://bit.ly/nKKGRg for full article

Can Smartphones Be Used As Criminal Evidence?- Click here http://bit.ly/nKKGRg for full article

Smartphone usage is increasingly becoming one of the most ubiquitous factor of life in the 21st century. Research data published by the International Data Corporation during the final quarter of 2010 indicated that smartphones outpaced desktop computers in sales. These figures aren't surprising to the tech-savvy crowd. It's not that PC sales are slowing down, it's just that more and more people are interested in carrying Internet-connected devices that feature many of the same functions as their home and work PCs.

The growing omnipresence of smartphones is influencing the way that law enforcement and the legal community perceive these devices. Police officers, federal agents, and prosecutors already know the potential trove of information that a suspect's smartphone may store: where the suspect has been (geolocation), what he or she likes to view and read online (browser history), information they may be interested in (search history), who the suspect's associates are, where they live, what they look like (contacts and photo galleries), and more.

Due to the portability and versatility of smartphones, we tend to store more potentially damning information on them. There's something about having a powerful multifunctional device in our hands that moves us to trust it with our deepest secrets; information that we wouldn't normally store in our desktop computers at home or at work. This is intimate information that can easily end up in the social media realm if we choose to share it right from our smartphones.

What is even more troubling is that social media often takes kindly to storing and neatly organizing all the information mentioned above in ways that can be easily accessed by smartphones. Most social media enterprises go to great lengths to ensure that users can access their sites via their smartphones with innovative apps that can be easily downloaded for free.

Many smartphone users have already developed deep personal attachments to their beloved devices and thus think of them as items subject to the principles of privacy and inviolability. But smartphones and their less intelligent ancestors (cell phones) have already been entered as evidence in criminal court, and law enforcement officers are quite fond of sleuthing around the contents of smartphones. The London Metropolitan Police Service already trains its officers to efficiently gather evidence contained in smartphones. And in the United States, the Supreme Court of California ruled on a 2011 drug trafficking case that police officers do not need to obtain search warrants to examine a suspect's cell phone.