Phone Calls and Text Messages to be logged
(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
New laws are shortly coming into force that require telephone companies, for both land lines and mobile telephones, must log information about calls and text messages made in the UK for a year. The stored data about calls made and received will be available to 652 public bodies, including the police and councils. However, access to the information will need to be approved by a senior police officer beforehand.
The new law brings the UK into line with the rest of the EU regarding data retention laws for telephones. The data stored falls into three levels.
- The phone’s owner
- The calls made by the phone
- The calls received by the phone and information on where the call was made.
There are concerns that the information would be used to build up a profile of relationships that we have, or misused by government bodies for applications other than tackling crime. I do think that there is far too much information held about us, and far too few controls to ensure its not misused. Just think of the massive issues we have surrounding identity theft at the moment!
October 12th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Indeed here in BE it’s the same.
There is also a similar law for your internet activity.
Logging your internet activity can be made more difficult by using proxy servers (if interested do some googling) or also a program called “Tor” might help.
Kind regards,
Kris
October 12th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
But you only need to be worried about the logging if you’re doing something wrong!
Dan