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London's police asked Big Tech for private communications data over 700,000 times last year
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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You can change your IP/Mac.
Most people cant. I work with people. Most of them can't even save a word document as a PDF. I had to deal with a very senior person today who redacted a document by highlighting the text and changed the background colour.
I have others who dont know how to share files on onedrive or password protect zip files. So whilst people on lemmy who, like Redditors skew towards being younger, male and computer savvy, the general population aren't
Most people when signing up to an email address don't do that straight away, or they inadvertently log in using their real one at some point. I'd scan a user log and just make a request for the subscriber data for all the IP addresses
As for the first bit? No idea, I'm not from London. But 700,000 requests potentially represent 700,000 complaints from people about alleged criminal activity. Might be less, might be more. But I can tell you now, no cop in the land has the time or inclination to start searching for this stuff unless its a crime thats been reported to them.
And I'm guessing from your tone you obviously dont agree with any of it. Which begs the question, if you become a victim how would you feel if the police simply responded "yeah we don't know whos doing it and we aren't gonna bother trying to find out, good luck"?
What does it matter what real people can or can't do? The article and topic is about police abusing innocent people by spying on them. The fact that they aren't able to do the things you're justifying them getting accused of only makes it worse, to the degree it's relevant at all.
The total number of offences in London for 2024 was 951803. Do you find it reasonable if 70% of those have an anonymous online component to them that is still clearly linked to the same crime?
What about the 106 times they did it to "specifically identify journalists’ sources"? Did someone make a report for each of the 93527 LycaMobile users, which the article pretty convincingly suggests were targeted because they're largely migrant workers?
Even if it was all legitimate, why does police need the power to search people's communication without evidence? Why don't they need warrants for communications data? Why don't "intelligence and security spies" need warrants for communications content? Why are they allowed to do cavity searches for communication equipment without evidence of a crime?
You're loading the question with the assumption that no investigation can be done without reading the communications of 700000 Londoners, and that the rights of innocents should be at my discretion if I've been victimised in any way.