Got a hot crime tip? Text the police

Seen a crime and want to report it anonymously? If you’re in the US or Canada, you can now dob people in using SMS, thanks to a new application from mBlox and Anderson Software called TipSoft.

It’s already being used by community action group Crime Stoppers and is already up and running in 16 Canadian cities. Another 32 cities in the US will be deploying the system soon, and after that, the application could be on its way to the UK.

Rather handily, the anonymity is two-way: the tips go from users’ phones and are delivered anonymously and the police can reply back without having access to the phone number of the user who sent in the tip. I wonder how it sits with privacy legislation: if cops really needed to get hold of the tipster, is there any privacy legislation that would block them?