German Courts Limit Data Retention Law... A Little Bit

from the good-for-them dept

Data retention has been a contentious issue. Various government organizations have pushed for laws that mandate that ISPs keep log data for many months after it's no longer needed, just in case some sort of crime was committed, and officials need to snoop on internet usage. This is one of those ideas that politicians and police love, but which tends not to be such a good idea in practice. First, it often makes it more difficult to find useful data. Second, it's crazy expensive. Third, the data will undoubtedly be abused. Still, the EU moved forward with a data retention law a few years back -- though, it appears the German courts have been trying to adjust it to deal with some of the big privacy questions. In late 2006, a German court said that, if an individual requests it, an ISP should delete his or her log files. A new ruling from a German court finds that access to these log files should be limited so that investigators only get access in response to "serious crimes." Of course, that opens up questions about what qualifies as "serious" and also what investigators were using the log files for before? If the entire point of data retention laws was to deal with serious crimes, it's a bit disturbing that court now needs to reinforce that point.

Filed Under: data retention, germany, privacy, serious crimes