Britain‘s info regulator mentioned on Tuesday it had reprimanded two police forces for recording over 200,000 telephone calls, seemingly with victims, witnesses and perpetrators of suspected crimes, with out folks’s information.

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

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

The ICO mentioned it grew to become conscious in 2020 that workers members throughout each police forces had entry to the app which recorded all incoming and outgoing telephone calls.

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

“We can only estimate the huge amount of personal data collected during these conversations, including highly sensitive information relating to suspected crimes,” ICO Deputy Commissioner for Regulatory Supervision Stephen Bonner mentioned within the assertion.

“This case should be a lesson learned to any organisation planning to introduce an app, product or service that uses people’s personal data. Organisations must consider people’s data protection rights and implement data protection principles from the very start.”