March 24, 2009 by James Oliver
The government could be about to gain access to your Facebook account, that’s if new plans announced today are approved. The home office is proposing forcing some social networks to hold data on the movements of their members in an effort to disrupt the activities of criminals.
The plan is part of the government’s ‘Intercept Modernisation Programme,’ a programme aimed at retaining information on phone calls, Internet visits, emails, etc. that is set to cost the government several billion pounds.
The retention of online traffic was already covered by the European Union’s Data Retention Directive which suggests that ISPs store online communications and traffic for one year in case it is required by the authorities. However, it was claimed recently by MPs that this directive does not go far enough since the directive does not cover social networking sites like Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.
In this country around 25 million people use social networking sites, meaning that almost half of the population would be affected by any such plan. Civil liberties groups are outraged by the news, claiming that the plan will excessively pry into the private lives of millions of innocent Internet users
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