Originally posted on Friday, 16 May, 2003, 16:51 GMT 17:51 UK 
at BBC News.
Officials in the UK are routinely demanding huge quantities of information about what people do online and who they call, say privacy experts.
Police and other officials are making around a million requests for access to data held by net and telephone companies each year, according to figures compiled from the government, legal experts and the internet industry.
The findings were announced at a public debate into government proposals to widen powers for internet snooping held in London this week.
But a Home Office spokesman disputed the figures, telling BBC News Online it estimated that the number of requests were half that suggested.
The requests include telephone billing data, e-mail logs and customer details, which privacy experts estimate could amount to a billion individual items of data, ranging from credit card numbers to numbers dialled.
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