Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has joined the opposition to the Communications Data Bill that was proposed by the UK government earlier this year. Civil rights groups have raised the alarm about provisions that could require British ISPs to keep records of every website their customers visit for 12 months. Now Wales is threatening to enable encryption on Wikipedia for UK Web users to protect their privacy.

"If we find that UK ISPs are mandated to keep track of every single webpage that you read at Wikipedia, I am almost certain we would immediately move to a default of encrypting all communication to the UK, so that the local ISP would only be able to see that you are speaking to Wikipedia, not what you are reading," Wales told members of parliament. He said this wouldn't be a difficult change to implement.

He said the data retention bill is "not the sort of thing I'd expect from a western democracy. It is the kind of thing I would expect from the Iranians or the Chinese."

The Guardian reports that Wales isn't the bill's only critic. Indeed, some of the nation's leading ISPs are also concerned about the legislation, which could impose new costs and administrative headaches. They also worried that data breaches could lead to users' browser records falling into the hands of hackers.

The Web has been slowly moving toward encryption by default, but so far the trend has mostly been limited to online services like Gmail and Twitter. Content sites like Wikipedia are usually delivered in the clear. But Wales predicts that intrusive data retention mandates could lead to encryption by default being adopted across the Web.