


There is a failure to inform the public about new surveillance technologies deployed by the state an absence of clear, accessible legal frameworks a lack of discernible action by governments and little to protect the public from data exploitation.

OXYGEN FORENSICS HOW DOES IT WORK SOFTWARE
Greater urgency is needed to address the risks that arise from such extraction, especially as we consider the addition of facial and emotion recognition to software which analyses the extracted data. In this context, cloud extraction technologies make for disturbing reading as we grasp how much is held in remote servers and accessible to even those with limited forensic skills who nonetheless are now able to acquire push button technologies that can ‘grab it all’.

OXYGEN FORENSICS HOW DOES IT WORK PROFESSIONAL
Your phone, with all the data there for exploitation, becomes the key to unlock your online personal and professional life. “Private cloud-based data represents a virtual goldmine of potential evidence for forensic investigators.”Īt Privacy International we have repeatedly raised concerns over risks of mobile phone extraction from a forensics perspective and highlighted the absence of effective privacy and security safeguards. Cloud extraction goes a step further, promising access to not just what is contained within the phone, but also to what is accessible from it. Yet as law enforcement increasingly turns to cloud extraction to obtain data from apps, a YouGov poll revealed that in the UK 45.6% of people have not thought about where data created by apps on their phone is stored and 44.3% of people do not know or think that apps on their phone use cloud storage.Īs we spend more time using social media, messaging apps, store files with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive, as our phones become more secure, locked devices harder to crack, and file-based encryption becomes more widespread, cloud extraction is, as a prominent industry player says, “arguably the future of mobile forensics.” That it ‘ does not reside on the physical device’ indicates that law enforcement is turning to ‘cloud extraction’: the forensic analysis of user data which is stored on third-party servers, typically used by device and application manufacturers to back up data. Yet it is not just what is physically stored on the phone that law enforcement are after, but what can be accessed from it, primarily data stored in the Cloud.Ĭellebrite, a prominent vendor of surveillance technology used to extract data from mobile phones, notes in its Annual Trend Survey that in approximately half of all investigations, cloud data ‘appears’ and that ‘ypically, this data involves social media or application data that does not reside on the physical device.’ Mobile phones remain the most frequently used and most important digital source for law enforcement investigations.
