Some people may be aware of the goings-on in the U.K. over "phone hacking" which led to the closure of the newspaper "News of the World" and is still the subject of a parliamentary commission.
One thing which arose this week was in regard to an issue with "hacking" the private voice mail of a person to listen to their messages, specifically in regards to a missing person who's voice mail quota was full and rejecting new messages only to suddenly accept messages in the middle of the police investigation and misleading the police as to whether this person was actually still alive.
The upshot was that when it was eventually discovered that the voice mail was hacked, the people doing the hacking were blamed for deleting the messages and therefore causing many other issues (apart from illegally accessing the voice mail).
Now it is claimed that the voice mail messages would be deleted automatically and therefore the "hackers" were not responsible for the message deletions, but my understanding is that only *played* messages would be auto-deleted, not the unheard ones, but this could also vary with each network.
If in this particular circumstance the played messages were subsequently auto-deleted to make space for new ones, then those doing the hacking were still responsible.
Does anyone know what the current methods/rules are for the various voice mail services in use around the world?