The UK government estimates it will cost 175m ($266m USD) a year to collect and store metadata, while ISP's are warning that the costs could be far higher, with 15TB passing over an average connection per year. Under the bill, providers would be required to store metadata for at least 12 months.

While many people now use a VPN which can help avoid metadata collection, everyone will have to pay an internet tax in the future to meet the costs of their government tracking their internet usage, even though collecting this data for VPN users is mostly pointless. "The indiscriminate collection of mass data is going to have a massive cost", says Matthew Hare of ISP Gigaclear.

In a similar situation to the Lenovo backdoor "Superfish", Dell has now acknowledged that a security hole exists in some of its recently shipped laptops that could make it easy for hackers to intercept users' private data.

Dell shipped a self-signed root CA certificate, with it's private key; intended to "provide a better, faster and easier customer support experience" but which can instead allow hackers to read encrypted messages and redirect browser traffic to spoofs of real websites. The certificate is included with newer XPS, Latitude, Inspiron and Precision laptops and can be manually removed. A string of recent key leakage and reuse vulnerabilities are an alarming reminder of the inherent trust we put in our hardware providers.

Two web-based tests are available, courtesy of Kenn White and Hanno Bick to check if you are vulnerable.