This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The total number of government requests for Australians’ phone, location and web data is far higher than government agencies are disclosing, with more than 500,000 separate requests for information made last year.

The latest annual report from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has revealed that there was 582,727 requests for phone, web browsing and location data – commonly known as “metadata” – that can reveal detailed information about a person’s personal lives and associations.

This figure is at odds with the more widely cited number of 300,000 a year, which is disclosed in the annual telecommunications interception reports made by the attorney general’s departments.

The ACMA annual report has been released amid a major push by the federal government to retain these types of personal data for a mandatory period of two years.

The proposal has been controversial because the majority of these requests can be obtained without warrants and can be requested by almost any government body, including local councils and even the RSPCA, and is currently the subject of a Senate inquiry.

The ACMA figures are concerning because they suggest the attorney general’s department’s figures do not account for every request for personal data made by government agencies.

Guardian Australia understands that when government bodies request personal information from multiple carriers – for instance to try to determine which carrier holds information on a certain phone number – that the series of requests are often conflated and only counted as a single request.

This approach leaves it to the discretion of agencies to combine requests from multiple carriers to be counted as just one “authorisation”.

A spokesman from the attorney general’s department said: “There is no conflict between the AGD [attorney general’s department] and ACMA reports.”

“For example, an agency can make an authorisation to seek the subscriber details of a particular person, but that authorisation needs to be given to multiple phone companies to check for the subscription details. If the person has multiple subscriptions with a number of carriers, that single authorisation will result in multiple disclosures.”

“The ACMA report will include the larger figure of disclosures from industry; the AGD report will include the smaller number of authorisations from agencies.”

The mass retention of telecommunications data has raised concerns among industry groups and civil liberties organisations due to the ease of access by government agencies and the increased risk of a major data breach.

In August Guardian Australia reported that the Australian federal police had accidentally disclosed sensitive metadata about criminal investigations by failing to redact documents provided to the Senate.