London's Metropolitan Police made over 700,000 requests to tech companies for private communications data in a single year, according to new transparency data. The scale of law enforcement surveillance requests raises serious privacy concerns.
The sheer volume is staggering - that's nearly 2,000 data requests per day. This deserves scrutiny on both the surveillance state angle and what it means for encrypted communications.
According to The Register, the Met requested communications data from major tech firms including encrypted services like Proton Mail, Signal, delivery platforms like Uber and JustEat, and mobile networks.
The numbers are eye-opening. LycaMobile alone received 93,527 requests in 2025 - a 500% surge from 15,702 in 2024. That carrier is used heavily by migrants and overseas callers, raising serious questions about whether this is crime investigation or immigration enforcement by another name.
Here's what they're requesting: not message content, but metadata. That includes account payment details, IP addresses, phone numbers, account creation dates, and last platform access times. If you think metadata is harmless, you haven't been paying attention - metadata reveals who you talk to, when, where you were, and your patterns of life.
What's particularly concerning is the targeting. Journalists were hit with 219 requests in 2024, lawyers with 157. Those are professions that rely on confidential communications to function. When police can routinely access metadata about who sources are calling or who clients are contacting, privilege and press freedom become theoretical.
The Met says officers "gather intelligence, solve crimes and find missing people." That's the standard justification. But 700,000 requests per year? That's not targeted investigation - that's dragnet surveillance.
As someone who built a fintech company, I dealt with law enforcement data requests. Legitimate ones are specific, documented, and clearly tied to active investigations. Mass requests on this scale suggest something else entirely.
The surveillance infrastructure we've built - where tech companies hold detailed records of our digital lives and governments can request them en masse - was sold as a terrorism-fighting necessity. What we got is routine, mass surveillance of ordinary people, journalists, and legal professionals.
Encrypted services claim they deny these requests or have no data to provide, but the discrepancies in the data suggest the reality is more complex. And crucially, targets are never notified they've been surveilled. You'll never know if police requested your data unless there's a prosecution.
