Satnav helps trace the bad guys

New Scientist reports: [edited]

In recent months the Met's detectives have used data recovered from satnav systems of suspects to investigate kidnappings, child grooming, murder and terrorism, forensic experts say.

The gadgets can store hundreds of records of recent locations visited, revealing, for example, a person's home. It also includes information on the destinations a potential criminal may have typed into a unit.

Beverly Nutter (not a made-up name, Ed), forensic analyst at the Met's Computer Systems Laboratory studied gadgets made by market-leader TomTom of the Netherlands. She found that they often retain records of past locations – old records have their file names removed but are not properly erased.

"The persistence of the records for the TomTom, I think, is more to do with the way data is moved around when new records are added to the [mapping] file. The edited file is written to a new location and the older version remains until overwritten," Nutter told New Scientist.
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