The Interception of Communications Commissioner (ICC), Sir Paul Kennedy, has disclosed in his latest annual report that public authorities made 525,130 communications data requests to broadband ISPs in the UK for people's phone and email records. A rise on 2008's figure of 504,073.


In related news the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has visited Google to investigate precisely what data was tracked by its Wi-Fi snooping StreetView cars. Some reports had claimed that the data, at least in Germany, included password information.

However the ICO appeared less concerned; "the information we saw does not include meaningful personal details that could be linked to an identifiable person ... on the basis of the samples we saw we are satisfied so far that it is unlikely that Google will have captured significant amounts of personal data".