With everything going on especially with the UK that made it mandatory to upload identification in order to use social media, it becomes inevitable for citizens around the world to start worrying about their online privacy. Can people in the government freely venture through our data like nothing? Well the answer is not quite.

The way this works is that the government first goes to data brokers or telecom companies to request a set of data, with a motif of course, most of the time these motifs are related to ongoing investigation where someone’s life might be endangered, this explains the high rate of data that was granted to the government.

Public concern about government surveillance has spiked following  revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the U.S. government harvested enormous amounts of personal data  from telecom and technology companies.

The number of times officials have  requested user data from Big Tech has skyrocketed by an average of 600%  over the same timeframe, Proton found. Meta’s data sharing surged by  675%, marking the largest increase, followed by Apple at 621% and  Google at 530%.

Telus said it received 4,315 court orders to hand over data, noting that each request could affect more than one customer. It said it challenges any order it believes is too broad, and a sampling of records suggested it handed over partial or no information in around 40 percent of those  cases.

more than half the requests it received were to track the location of a device to protect someone's life, health or security in an  emergency. It said it received 40,900 requests for information such as  the names and addresses associated with a phone number.

The company said it has tightened its disclosure procedure following a  Supreme Court of Canada ruling in June that said authorities must obtain a warrant before asking telecom companies for customer information.