Miroslav Bača is a full professor at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics in Varaždin, University of Zagreb, where he teaches courses in the abuse and security of information systems, and biometrics. He is the President of the Committee on the Specialised Postgraduate Study Programme in Information Systems Security and Auditing Management at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics. In his current scientific and professional work, he primarily focuses on the protection and security of information systems, as well as the domains of computer forensics and digital evidence. In addition, he has so far written over 50 scientific and professional papers on this topic, as well as several books. He is a permanent court expert witness in biometry, informatics and telecommunications, and has, in such capacity, given several hundred different expert testimonies. Furthermore, he is a certified European Privacy Seal expert evaluator for IT products and IT-based services for the whole of EU.
Digital Forensics and Privacy
Both the charge itself and the right to privacy represent a new challenge to digital evidence investigators when gathering digital evidence within investigative activity. Must a person being investigated provide a password for his or her computer, account, or file, without which the exclusion and gathering of digital evidence sometimes is not possible? How do we interpret data that the user “deleted” from his or her computer and may such data being retrieved, whose metadata are lost, be taken into account during the investigation? What about private data collected on a person (whether such person is or is not a suspect) and private data regarding other persons found during the gathering and exclusion of digital evidence? There are still many unanswered questions. This lecture will touch on some of these issues and offer several possible solutions, based both on the EU legislation and considerable professional and expert experience.