The U.K. government has been collecting info on World Wide Web use, particularly online porn, news and social media sites, amounting to billions of pieces of data from virtually everyone on the Internet they could identify.
Websites monitored visits to Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, reddit, CNN, BBC, Reuters and others.
The Intercept, an online publication launched partly as a platform for stories based on the leaks of NSA contractor Edward Snowden, is reporting that the British government had a spy program, KARMA Police (after the Radiohead song, presumably), whose goal was to track the web browsing and other online activities of "every visible user on the Internet."
The site reported, based on information leaked by Snowden, that some 50 billion metadata records per day were being collected and stored from browsing histories and habits as well as emails and phone calls.
Intercept said the info was collected without notice or warrants and archived and searched for connections to terrorism or criminal activity.
