UK Firemen Can Read Your Email

from the um,-but-why? dept

I don’t follow data privacy laws outside the US to carefully, so this one is a bit of a surprise to me. According to this article, under a new “snooper’s charter”, fire authorities and ambulance services will now be able to request access to your phone records and internet data. Why does the fireman need to read your email? Not really sure, but the option is there for them. In a separate, but related announcement, phone companies now need to keep copies of all such records for a year.


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Comments on “UK Firemen Can Read Your Email”

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5 Comments
micm says:

It's not so stupid..

Post Bain reveiw, fire crews are supposed to move their focus from fighting fires to fire prevention. This means doing some work to catch arsonists and so on. Also the main cause of injury to firefighters these days is assault rather than fire/smoke related.
Of course before the police would be involved with these types of thing, but the option is now there to remove the middle man where it makes sense. For example think of someone making repeated hoax calls to 999 (112 etc) – before it would have to be raised to the police and there would be a whole load of messing about whilst not a lot happened. Under the new laws the Fire Brigade (Fire Department) can request phone records directly from the phone companies directly. That’s just one example, there are many more which I shan’t go in to.
Of course you could argue that the police should be more efficient at dealing with requests of behalf of the other emergency services in which case they probably wouldn’t be asking for access to this stuff…

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