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Phone hacking involves the unlawful interception of private voicemails and other communications, typically carried out by journalists or people acting on their behalf, without consent or lawful authority.
It came to widespread public attention in July 2011, when it was revealed that News of the World journalists had hacked the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler in 2002 — and may have deleted messages, giving her family false hope she was still alive. Within days, Rupert Murdoch closed the 168-year-old newspaper entirely, and the revelations led directly to the Leveson Inquiry into press standards and practices.
When Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed for hacking in 2007, News International insisted it was the work of a single "rogue reporter." That claim was later shown to be false: police eventually identified nearly 6,000 potential victims from material seized from Mulcaire alone — evidence of an industrial-scale practice, not an isolated one.
Phone hacking can include:
This harm has affected:
Many victims only discovered they had been targeted years later, once wider investigations began to uncover the true scale of the practice.
For years, publishers dismissed hacking as the isolated actions of individual journalists — even as evidence of a systemic, organised practice mounted. Early settlements with victims such as Gordon Taylor and Max Clifford, worth over £1m each, came with conditions that prevented further details emerging in court — delaying wider disclosure for years rather than resolving it.
Criminal prosecutions and civil litigation have since secured some measure of accountability, but many victims have had to pursue lengthy, costly legal action themselves, rather than benefiting from an effective, independent system of press regulation.
Key fact: More than a decade after Leveson, victims of phone hacking are still bringing civil claims against national newspaper groups — the reckoning with this practice remains unfinished.
A free and accountable press must operate within the law, and must be held to account when it does not.
Following the 2011 revelations, UK mobile operators moved quickly to close the most basic vulnerability that enabled mass hacking: guessable default voicemail PINs, and remote access without a PIN at all. Today, most networks block voicemail access from any device other than the subscriber's own, unless a PIN has been deliberately set.
That doesn't mean the risk has disappeared. Independent security testing in 2014 — three years after Leveson — still found voicemail inboxes on UK networks that could be accessed without any PIN at all. And even where the original method has been closed off, the underlying incentive for journalists or private investigators to obtain private information unlawfully hasn't gone away; it can simply shift to other methods — hacking email or social media accounts, misusing subject access requests, or engaging private investigators to obtain information by other unlawful means.
Hacked Off's position is not that phone hacking, specifically, remains widespread today — we have no evidence either way. It is that unlawful information-gathering by the press is a pattern, not an isolated failure, and there is little to stop that pattern recurring in a different form without an effective, independent system of accountability.
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