Downloading BT Mobile voice messages to pass on to the police

[Parply]

Hi all,

I have a daughter with a stalker who's been problematic enough recently to be arrested by the police. As part of their investigations, the police are keen to access and review all relevant communications. This includes many voicemail messages stored on my daughter's BT Mobile number. There seems to be no obvious way to download these in a format that can be easily passed on to the police. When my daughter called BT support earlier to ask for help she was told the only option they could suggest was to replay every message loud enough to be recorded by another device into a format that could be passed on. Does anyone see anything wrong with this suggestion? Surely BT can support an ongoing police investigation and pass on these messages more reliably and sensitively. Do we need to tell the police to approach BT directly?

Regards

     Parply

[infinitywaiter]

BT would really only release confidential information like this if they have a direct court order from the Police, therefore you would be best placed getting them to contact BT directly.

You can try through a public request, however this would most likely be limited.

See here: Privacy Policy

Look under 'Consumer Privacy Policy' and then 'How do I make a request' and use the online form to put in a request.

You should also read the section 'To protect our business, our customers and the public' as this will go into detail what BT can do for residential side.

It is also listed on the Business privacy policy under the dropdown menu of 'How we use personal information, and our legal grounds for doing so' and then 'To prevent, detect and investigate crime and fraud (and other illegal activities)'.

Hopefully this gets sorted out for your daughter promptly, wishing you all the best.

[rbz5416]

Google suggests that iPhones can do it but not Android, so you would be limited to recording to another device AFAIK.

I'm surprised that the police haven't approached BT directly for the recordings, as that's the correct process. Otherwise there is no provenance for where the recordings came from. In this day & age they could have been manufactured.

[Parply]

I don't think that this is especially relevant as it relates to persona data that BT collects and processes as part of running the business. Voicemails are the customer's data that BT stores as part of the service offered in the mobile contract. We have access to the voicemails but not in a convenient format to pass on to the police. Something that most modern telecoms companies would be expected to be able to do. 

[Parply]

BT does not support visual voicemail that would allow downloading of the voicemails from an Apple device running iOS. Given this I assume that BT does not support the alternative under Android. We don't have any devices running android anyway.

Regarding provenance. I've already passed on some electronic information. They sent me an email request and a secure link. From this I assume the context is likely to be enough provenance. At least that and a statement accompanying the data seems to be sufficient to satisfy the police at the moment.