Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard a discussion on the radio where a lady was describing the potential use of a third party identity provider for all social media. This would be instead of the government. If I understood it correctly, the third party would hold your ID etc, and would vouch for you on signup to services. Users would be anonymous/pseudonymous until a warrant was acquired by the police. A third party would be better IMO than the…
I don't think having a third party instead of government control would be any better because the Snowden leaks showed us that the intelligence agencies will simply secretly co-opt the service to their own ends.
Now that people are used to that idea, I expect a government to say "Why don't you store the logs on our computers instead, to save money and be protected with military-grade security. We promise we will still go to the hassle of getting a warrant before reading from the database... Unless of course there's an emergency...".
Perhaps the reason they haven't said this yet is because government cyber-security agencies have already gained real-time unwarranted access to the ISPs' logs. I don't suppose a company could be sued for not correctly securing this data against the government, since the government could hide behind "national security" to block any evidence being admitted in a court case.