If you're a criminal and trying to hide your online behaviour you'd do well to start craving cheeseburgers.
Places with public WiFi, like fast food restaurants, cafes and airports, could soon be some of the few spots in Australia to hide what you're looking at online.
It's a loophole in plans to force telecommunication companies to retain metadata.
Under proposed data retention laws, telcos will be made to store two years' worth of metadata - including IP addresses of websites visited - to aid Australian spies and law enforcement.
But at a cafe or other venue with public WiFi, there's no way for ASIO or police to know which device accessed which IP address.
A parliamentary committee is scrutinising the new laws, which exempt venues like airports or cafes that offer WiFi from collecting data.
It's an exclusion Victorian Police label a "big gap" in the legislation but the Australian Federal Police (AFP) say criminals will still be caught.
"It's not the end of the world," AFP Deputy Commissioner Michael Phelan told the inquiry on Friday.
"It doesn't mean that we don't have other technologies or abilities to exploit that situation."
Exempting cafes is part of the proportionality argument, raised several times by multiple witnesses at the inquiry.
The idea is the government must weigh up the need to retain data to solve or prevent crimes against any invasion of privacy.
The AFP believe they've given a lot of concessions already due to proportionality, and would prefer to have data retained for longer than two years.
ASIO agrees.
"I would be very unhappy with anything less than two years," Director-General of Security Duncan Lewis told the inquiry.
Telcos already collect metadata and retain it for billing and other purposes.
How long it's held is up to the company and often determined by the cost of storage.
NSW police and the AFP told the committee that while metadata would have been useful during and after the Sydney siege, the new laws wouldn't have prevented the incident.
However, all agencies agree access to metadata is crucial to undertaking their work.
Over the past five years, the AFP has requested access to historical telecommunications data more than 110,000 times.
And Mr Lewis told the inquiry metadata had been essential in most high priority ASIO cases.
However, the proposed laws have outraged civil libertarians and privacy groups.
"It imposes an unacceptably high level of interference with privacy that is neither necessary nor proportionate to the objectives of law enforcement and national security," Australian Privacy Foundation vice chair David Lindsay told the committee.
The Law Council recommends scrapping the bill in its current form, concerned over plans to prescribe the amount and type of data to be collected in regulation, not legislation - making it easier to change.
Powers allowing the attorney-general to declare an agency eligible to access metadata have also come under fire as too broad.
The government has agreed to front up a reasonable amount of the cost - although the proportion is yet to be determined.
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