GetUp campaigner Alycia Gawthorne said forcing telcos and ISPs to store vast quantities of personal data removes the presumption of innocence and treats all Australians as suspects. “The worst thing about this legislation is that it’s virtually useless in the face of criminals who are already operating online with anonymous browsers and rerouted locations. A sweeping data retention scheme won’t stop criminals, but it will jeopardise the privacy of millions of Australians and pose a serious threat to our democracy.”

GetUp want you to ’go dark’ and lobby Labor – that currently support the bill – to vote against it.

GetUp has a simple guide to help Australians go dark and its easy to implement – all services are legal.

GetUp says if you are planning to do something bad and don't want people to know about it, chances are you're already aware of these tools and using them. The point is, if the data retention scheme is intended to catch criminals – why were not these tools given proper scrutiny and accounted for when the Government drafted the data retention legislation?

Ironically, one suggestion is to use government provided public Wi-Fi at council hotspots, libraries, universities, or even Parliament House and at other free Wi-Fi in shopping centres etc. – as these do not require user identification. The only issue with that is if untoward messages are sent authorities will know and with the level of public surveillance at such places probably find the perpetrator.

Another suggestion is to use Tor browser that uses a series of virtual tunnels instead of a direct internet connection. Tor can protect against a common form of Internet surveillance known as "traffic analysis." Traffic analysis can be used to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. Knowing the source and destination of your Internet traffic allows others to track your behaviour and interests.

For Australians, use of overseas services – Gmail, HotMail, Twitter Direct messages, Whatsapp or Google chat - that are not subject to meta data laws may provide anonymity. They do warn that Intelligence agencies can see if you are using these services via traffic analysis.

It did not mention use of a virtual private network – this is a solution for the ultra-paranoid that tunnels traffic to an internet server in another country – anonymising browsing, torrents and more. The downside is that download speeds are severely affected.

iTWire has a good article on privacy and how meta and big data is collected. Worth a read.