FOI 821-2024 / Sep 2024 / Deepfake porn
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 821-2024
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 16th September 2024 as follows:
- For each of the months February, March, April, May, June, July and August 2024, how many reports did your police force receive alleging the offence of sharing explicit images or videos that have been digitally manipulated to look like someone else without their consent, commonly known as ‘fake porn’ or ‘deepfake porn’ (covered by the Online Safety Act 2023)?
- Given there could be multiple reports about one individual, I am also asking the following question. For each of the months February, March, April, May, June, July and August 2024, how many individuals did your police force receive allegations about relating to the offence of sharing explicit images or videos that have been digitally manipulated to look like someone else without their consent, commonly known as ‘fake porn’ or ‘deepfake porn’ (covered by the Online Safety Act 2023).
- For each of the months February, March, April, May, June, July and August 2024, how many people were charged under the Online Safety Act with the offence of sharing explicit images or videos that have been digitally manipulated to look like someone else without their consent, commonly known as ‘fake porn’ or ‘deepfake porn’?
- Given one individual could be charged with multiple offences, I am also asking the following question. For each of the months February, March, April, May, June, July and August 2024, how many charges were made by your police force under the Online Safety Act of the offence of sharing explicit images or videos that have been digitally manipulated to look like someone else without their consent, commonly known as ‘fake porn’ or ‘deepfake porn’?
- Among the reports of victims of ‘deepfake porn’ for each of the months February, March, April, May, June, July and August 2024, how many were under the age of 18?
- Among the reports of victims of ‘deepfake porn’ for each of the months February, March, April, May, June, July and August 2024, how many were under the age of 10?
For clarity, for the questions above, I am asking for charges under the following law, Section 66B, Sexual Offences Act:
- A person (A) commits an offence if –
- A intentionally shares a photograph or film which shows, or appears to show, another person (B) in an intimate state,
- B does not consent to the sharing of the photograph or film, and
- A does not reasonably believe that B consents.
Full legislation is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/66B
- For each of the months August, September, October, November and December 2023 and January and February 2024, how many reports did your police force receive alleging the offence of deepfake sexual abuse under other legislation (before the Online Safety Act 2023 came into force) – e.g. communication offences or harassment legislation?
- Given there could be multiple reports about one individual, I am also asking the following question. For each of the months August, September, October, November and December 2023 and January and February 2024, how many individuals did your police force receive allegations about relating to the offence of deepfake sexual abuse under other legislation (before the Online Safety Act 2023 came into force)?
- For each of the months August, September, October, November and December 2023 and January and February 2024, how many people were charged with the offence of deepfake sexual abuse under other legislation (before the Online Safety Act 2023 came into force)?
- Given one individual could be charged with multiple offences, I am also asking the following question. For each of the months August, September, October, November and December 2023 and January and February 2024, how many charges were made by your police force of the offence of deepfake sexual abuse under other legislation (before the Online Safety Act 2023 came into force)?
If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please prioritise questions in number order. Questions 1-6 should be prioritised over questions 7-10.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in providing the response to your request and for any inconvenience that this may have caused you. Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Q1 response: Searches were conducted for all offences under Home Office Code 088/15 - Sharing or threatening to share intimate photograph or film to cause alarm, distress or humiliation, or for sexual gratification. The resulting records were then reviewed to ascertain whether circumstances mentioned, within the MO Description/Incident Summary fields, circumstances indicating that images had been digitally manipulated to look like someone else without their consent, commonly known as ‘fake porn’ or ‘deepfake porn’. I can advise that, based on these searches, no records were located relevant to your request, our response is therefore ‘no information held’.
Q2 to Q6 response: Not applicable
Q7 to Q10 response: Please be advised that the requested information is not centrally recorded and is therefore not held in a readily retrievable format. There is no specific identifier for ‘deepfake’, and no flag or marker to easily identify when this has occurred in relation to an offence. Keyword searches are not carried out routinely as they are not reliable, they will only bring back records where the chosen keyword(s) is present within the MO Description / Incident Summary of an investigation, these are limited free text fields and do not contain all information in relation to an investigation. In order to provide an accurate response to your request it would be necessary to review the wider investigation papers in relation to each and every crime including, but not limited to, ‘Blackmail’, ‘Disclose or threats to disclose private sexual photographs/film with intent to cause distress’, ‘Malicious Communications’ etc. Just looking at ‘Blackmail’ and ‘Malicious Communications’ offences recorded during the specified time period, this has returned 877 results. At 5 minutes per record this would equate to 73 hours of work which would exceed the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e., the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. For Police forces in the UK, the "appropriate limit" is up to 18 hours of work on one request.
In accordance with section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this request.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance; however, due to the volume of records which would need to be individually reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way to reduce your request into one which could be managed within the fees limit.
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is as accurate as possible.
Your attention is drawn to the below which details your right of complaint.
Should you have any further enquiries concerning this matter, please write or email the Freedom of Information Unit quoting the reference number above.
Yours sincerely
Freedom of Information Officer
Freedom of Information Unit
Warwickshire Police
PO Box 4
Leek Wootton
Warwickshire
CV35 7QB