I was sitting in the office this morning catching up with Gurpreet Singh Thathy, along with the usual topics (weather, football etc.) and we started to discuss how technology has changed and advanced so quickly, especially mobile phones. We regularly post about technology and the advantages and disadvantages of using it. However, what intrigued me about this conversation was how quickly it had changed in such a short space of time. Gurpreet started working in digital forensics back in 2007. Smartphones were starting to come in by then, but he told me that back then, the information you used to retrieve from handsets was usually contacts, call register (dialled, missed and received) and SMS messages. You had to manually acquire the SMS reports by photographing the screen. He also mentioned that phone manufacturers were always racing to make phones lighter and smaller (Nokia 8210, 8310). Fast forward to today, and now we have larger phones and tablets and it doesn’t appear to matter to the manufacturer or consumer about size or weight, it’s all about ‘functionality’. Only yesterday Gurpreet was retrieving data from a handset for a client and that single handset alone had over 26,000 text messages, 56,000 images and 10,000 videos on it – no wonder the client was keen to retrieve all that personal information. It’s amazing what information we store on such a small device. In my early days as a police officer, it was mostly pagers, fax machines, the post and manual notes on pads. Technology has and continues to advance at pace, and we need to keep up with it to ensure we can counter the criminals who wish to steal our personal data and use it for nefarious means. Just as we were both starting to feel rather old with all the talk of phone evolution, Dave walked in (it was raining, he was on his bike) and we felt better as he mentioned he used to use ‘carrier pigeons’ ?
Have a great day!
