Data flow: Vodafone reveals phone monitoring numbers - but many nations ban statistics on surveillance

Earlier this year, the international mobile phone carrier Vodafone Group released figures showing how often it had intercepted a call or supplied call metadata at the request of a government. The most interesting aspect was not the raw numbers of requests (which can yield very misleading figures due to differences in market share and what a request covers in various jurisdictions), but how willing governments were to allow Vodafone to disclose the information. This is illustrated via a graphic.