The Guardian view on surveillance: make your number unobtainable
![Person looking at Facebook logo on mobile phone](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1e0e1ecb2148ad8d0c279c3f0c0076015dd4c023/0_117_3844_2306/master/3844.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=3ff359f4a66481c3499db8ccd6a1be87)
Yet the material collected in this way can only be accessed under a system of legal and political oversight: the Home Office might like more powers, but the European court of justice ruled in December 2016 that independent judicial authorisation was needed for the “general and indiscriminate retention” of personal data. All that fuss over a year’s worth of websites, when it turns out that Facebook has been storing all the contact details, the instant messages, and the phone calls of millions of its users for as long as 10 years without anyone outside the firm realising what their apparently innocuous consent implied.
No comments:
Post a Comment