The Home Office said it was needed to tackle crime gangs and terrorists who might use the sites, but said it would not keep the content of conversations.
Civil liberties campaigners have called the proposal a “snoopers’ charter”.”
I’m normally the first person to moan about the government taking liberties with our privacy, but in this case I see no problem. After all social network sites only have the data that you wish to place on them. If you don’t want people looking in your living room you put up net curtains, if you don’t want people looking at your personal data you don’t join a social network site.
The government is attacking our civil liberties in much more insidious manners than just looking at data which we choose to provide to a website.
For example, there is a certain expectation of privacy when you send an email but the government want to snoop on them, just like we don’t expect our paper based mail to be opened and read.