Collection of Internet Connection Records
Internet surveillance activity in the United Kingdom

As of March 2021, collection of Internet Connection Records is being secretly trialled by two major British ISPs as part of a technical trial for mass surveillance under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. The Home Office and National Crime Agency are also participating in the trial.
"Internet Connection Records" is a generic term for metadata records of UK Internet users' Internet access patterns. Data collected may include who they are, what sites they connected to and when, and what quantity of data was transferred, but does not include the data content of the transmissions. While the participants have been kept secret, the existence of the trial has been confirmed by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 8, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q105905498. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Collection of Internet Connection Records” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.