How Will Data Retention Laws Impact Skype?

from the that's-a-lot-of-data dept

The push for data retention laws has always been something of a problem. The idea sounds good from a bureaucratic sense. By forcing service providers to "retain" data on user communications, you can easily go back and pull out the important data when a crime happens. That's the simple, politicians' analysis of the issue. The problem, though is twofold. First off, it's a lot of data. And the problem when you have a lot of data is that you have a lot of useless data hiding the useful data. Just because you have more data, doesn't mean you have good data -- and finding the good data isn't always so easy. Second, it's ridiculously expensive for companies to comply -- which is an overall drain on resources. Another angle, though, is that data retention laws are often tricky to parse in the face of innovation. As an anonymous reader points out, the current proposals for data retention laws in Europe leave Skype in a weird middle ground, where they might need to retain an awful lot of data about how people are using their system. Once again, this is one of the problems you get when your regulatory scheme is based on quacks like a duck concepts. You're not regulating based on what's actually happening, but what the system looks like -- and that discourages innovation by making it unclear what's covered and also discouraging connections into existing systems.