Mar 24, 2021
1 min read
Internet providers tracking sites we visit in secretive trial
Two internet providers are tracking and collecting the websites visited by their customers as part of a secretive Home Office trial, designed to work out if a national bulk surveillance system would be useful for national security and law enforcement.
Details about the data collection experiment are limited, emerging via an obscure regulatory disclosure and a report in Wired, prompting campaigners to warn of a lack of transparency over data being “hoovered up into a surveillance net”.
Under the two trials, the Home Office is working with the National Crime Agency to harvest “internet connection records (ICRs)” — information about which websites a customer visited, when they did so and how much data they downloaded.
