German ISP Forced To Delete IP Logs

An anonymous reader writes "A German federal court decided today that T-Online, one of the largest ISPs in Germany, was obligated to delete all IP logs of a customer upon request to guarantee their privacy. From the article: 'The decision (German) does not mean that T-Online is now obliged to delete all their IP-logs, the customers first need to complain. But, if they ask T-Online to delete their IP-logs, the ISP has no other choice than to comply. A lawyer from Frankfurt already sketched a sample letter (German) to make this process easier.'"

The way it should be.

There's not a chance in hell that anything like this would ever happen in the United States. I hope it works for the Germans. This is the way privacy should be treated. The people have rights.

Re:The way it should be.

Let me explain. I do not "expect" privacy. I do not "expect" all ISPs to spend millions of Euros on logging mechanisms based on each user records. The impact of this is huge. Currently all user activities are normally written to a single log file. The files are normally rotated based on time.

This case is about deleting a particular user's records. If you don't keep them, you don't have to do anything. You seem to say you'll need to create an all-encompassing tracking system so you can selctively delete the records. Just delete them all as soon as you've abstracted any information you need for billing or debugging.

Has anyone asked what the plaintiff has to hide? hope he gets cyber-stalked by a hate group

In TFA: "The court ruling is the result of a case that was initiated by Holger Voss, a 33 year old man from Münster. Voss was sued for making a sarcastic comment in an Internet forum back in 2002."

Sarcasm? Yeah, he totally deserves to be stalked and vilified by a hate group. That'll learn him not to mouth off.

Re:The way it should be.

Germany takes privacy laws to the extreme, in my opinion.

As a admin, working for a german company in Germany, I know that our privacy laws are a PITA.

As a german citizen, living and working in Germany I think our privacy laws are way too relaxed.

That said, I very much welcome the decision of the court. We had a couple of similar decisions lately. And one always got the impression that the judges not only talking about the very case they had to handle, but that their sentence was also aimed at our politians to show them how german courts think about the EU data retention act. This one can't be trialed in Germany yet, as it hasn't become german law as of now. So this seem like a warning about what to expect when that gets taken to court, once it made it into german law.

What type of logs?

The article is vague. Are these the logs of connections made, or are they the logs of when an address was assigned to them by DHCP, or what?

Re:What type of logs?

Radius, actually. That particular ISP does not use DHCP; all (A|V)DSL(2\+?)? connections are handled with PPPoE, so you get your IP from the PPP session set-up. Connections are reset every 24 hours automatically, and you do not usually get the same IP again after 24 hours (they claim this is done for technical reasons, which is, simply put, BS :)

Requests to delete server logs

Requests to delete server logs, however, will be logged.

Re:Requests to delete server logs

Fear not! Google has a copy.

But no privacy in the land of the free

I wonder why the average American (or Brit) doesn't demand the same level of privacy that many of the mainland Europeans now have? While some other freedoms (e.g. speech,press) are more limited in countries like Germany, there appears to be a strong right-to-privacy movement backed up by the government.

Sure, our media and government pay lip service to privacy issues, but the reality is that our government wants to increase monitoring in the name of fighting terror. Compare this story of Germany forcing the ISP to delete logs for a customer to this one [msn.com] outlining yet another argument by US officials to require ISPs to maintain even more user data.

I'd hate to see us to become a 'surveillance society' like Britain has. Unfortunately, we seem to be quickly heading down that path, particularly since our citizens haven't yet raised up to demand greater freedom.

Re:But no privacy in the land of the free

some other freedoms (e.g. speech,press) are more limited in countries like Germany

Any source? Just curious, as I am living in Germany and did not really realize.

Also:

Press Freedom Index 2006 [rsf.org]

CC.

Re:But no privacy in the land of the free

Sorry, but you're wrong there. Copyright for "Mein Kampf" has fallen to the state of Bavaria after Hitlers death (since there were no heirs). You can only get an annotated version as Bavaria won't publish the original version. 2015 the copyright should expire (70 years after authors death) and the book should go into the public domain (barring any changes to copyright laws).

Re:But no privacy in the land of the free

He may be considering hate speech [wikipedia.org] laws, but then, on the other hand, is he considering free speech zones [wikipedia.org] in the US, and so on? I'm hesitant to call freedoms more limited in countries like Germany for this reason, especially with the actions GWB has taken in the US lately.

Re:But no privacy in the land of the free

UK does have laws protecting peoples privacy. Namely the Data Protection Act and Rights of Investigatory Powers Act. The first one controls disclosure as well as providing means for individuals to review the data kept about them. The second controls what a co. such as an ISP can do with the data (eg traffic logs) as well as what the authorities can do. The two together means that you have to be able to justify the data you keep and for how long you keep it. The network that I work for does not keep data for longer than 3 months, unless it relevent to some network issue/investigation, then its kept for 2 years; but never indefinately. Lastly there is also the Freedom of Information Act, which allows citizen access to all sorts of government and civil service information and documentation. So you can double check their procedures for example.

Re:But no privacy in the land of the free

People sometimes do learn from history, though the knowledge probably gets diluted with time and distance.

The fear of politicians and government of being perceived as nationalist sometimes has perverse results. Here in the Netherlands we used to have a historical curriculum that identified tolerance as a key part of national identity, but the reluctance of government to prescribe historical dogma about "our ancestors" gives license to for instance schools with a majority of muslim pupils to gloss over impopular subjects like the holocaust and the eighty years' war (1568-1648), where "our protestant ancestors" are the ones being persecuted.

Teaching children about the attack by the resistance in 1943 on the population register in Amsterdam, with the intent to burn it down in order to frustrate Nazi bureaucracy, is the best way to instill respect for privacy. Reference to this event that most people know about is a powerful antidote to suggestions that "you have nothing to fear if you are innocent": it was the Dutch government that, in better days, compiled the data that allowed the Nazis to trace most jews (population register) and gave them few places to hide (cadastral maps). What to remember and what to forget is still a policy choice.

The US and continental Europe have different experiences of, and therefore perspectives on, WWII. For the US, WWII is a license to interfere militarily in perceived Nazi regimes abroad (as they did in WWII), while formerly occupied countries, and Germany itself, are busy simply not being a Nazi regime.

A question for network admins

I'm not an admin, and never have been so I'm working on ignorance here. But my question is, why bother with long term logs anyway? I understand a need to keep logs of activity for a week or so to deal with various attacks, zombie machines, etc, but why not set the logs to automatically wipe anything past that point? I can see maybe going nasty and selling it to advertisers, but other than stuff like that is there a use?

Re:A question for network admins

I work for an ISP. As part of my job, I handle abuse reports. Often
reports are for events more than a week old (typically worm type reports
come fast, but spam reports are often delayed because the recipients
don't read their email every day).

We also use long-term data for trend analysis: which POP needs more or
less dialup lines, who dialed in to a POP (with how much they pay, does
the POP make financial sense), etc.

While trend analysis doesn't require IP addresses (for the most part),
the call database has a record per call that includes the IP (same
database as used for IP abuse lookups). To not retain IP addresses,
we'd have to set up a second database, second lookup interface, and some
transfer mechanism between the "with IP" and "without IP" databases.
That's a real PITA, so we don't do that.

Data Retention Directive?

Isn't there an EU Directive regarding data retention that went through in response to "the terrorist threat"? How does that gel with this ruling?

You Can Delete the Logs Present Now...

...but what happens when the user logs on again, after the IP log purge? Are they back in the records from that point on?

Blurb text misleading

Not /exactly/ true. The sample letter speaks of a complaint, but T-Online has every choice not to comply.
The linked webpage then recommends sueing T-Online in that case. If/Once you win that lawsuit, T-Online has no choice but to comply. This is a tad different from what the blurb here would have you believe.

(All this is based on rather strict privacy laws that require a provider not to collect any data not relevant to accounting; since IP addresses and data volume is not needed for accounting on plans with a flat fee per month, T-Online has no right to do so; they, however, save that data for 80 days.)

Of course!

The A in AT&T stands for American.... You don't exactly see GT&T do you?

After Deleting the Logs...

After deleting the logs, does the ISP have to delete the letter that requested the logs be deleted?

Google Language is a real boon :)

Sometimes tools like Google language or Babelfish are an absolute necessity when dealing with texts in a language other than your own...

Othertimes though... [google.com]

The deplored one is condemned to omit it with the use of the Internet entrance

Machine translation just isn't up to task.

Over here we force deletion of election logs

Thanks Diebold!

Good and bad.

The main problem, as I see it, is that a huge load of users will be infected by malware, which is used to spam. If these same users have requested that all their IP logs should be deleted after disconnect - things get rather tricky.

Also, what if a spammer signs up, requests all logs to be deleted .. waits .. and then starts spamming? Pretty damn difficult to track down if a lot of users have requested that their IPs should not be logged.

On the other hand, I hate that the spam problem should be solved by violating privacy. It was all okay for me when ISPs logged what they wanted, but didn't hand it over to anyone except when they found it necessary to investigate something themselves - due to complaints which would hurt the ISP itself (i.e spammers.. RBL's .. and so forth).

er

99 luftballoons?

Not quite as good as it looks

The original article [spiegel.de] points out that keeping logs is incompatible with existing German law. But the law will soon be changed, because Germany will have to comply with an EU directive mandating that logs be kept for at least 6 months. Germany has already asked for an extension of the deadline to comply with this, but the strong likelihood is that the German privacy laws will be changed to comply with the EU-mandated snooping.

EU pols and bureaucrats are as hostile to personal privacy as US pols and bureaucrats.

The interesting political spin...

The ISP is germany's biggest ISP, the "Telekom". By the law, they were only entitled to keep logs that are required for billing. If you have a flatrate, no IP-logs are needed for billing and other ISPs didn't keep them, but the Telekom did.

Now here's the interesting bit: The entity that owns most of Telekom's shares is - the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the German gouvernment. The "Innenminister", the guy responsible for the justice system, police etc. was one of the kind of politicians who'd like to know everything about everyone for the sake of "security". (Who needs freedom if they are secure? Oh wait, that was prison.)

So, while by the law he could not force ISPs to retain that data, the biggest german ISP that just happened to be controlled by... him(!)... did so anyway, aiding law enforcement in trivial (and here: unfounded) cases with said data.

Unfortunately, even in germany, noone seems to bother about privacy anymore.

would this work in the UK?

technically the data protection act says that any company must remove all your details and information they have on you upon your request... any ideas?

There is one important information missing ...

... in the article. This court decision only applies to this one customer. If any other customer wants their ISP to actually comply with the current law in Germany (and sadly hardly any do at the moment) they also have to sue, every single one of them. Currently this court decision doesn't change much, but chances are good that more customers will sue and ISPs will finally realize that cannot continue like this anymore. Well, that is until the EU forces Germany to change the law and makes us give up even more privacy.

Possible in the UK?

It sounds like this might be possible in the UK as well. The Data Protection Act allows an individual to request all electronically stored data about them at a company be deleted. Normally they can charge you a nominal fee (£10) to do it, but they must comply.

Bakups Anyone?

I would assume that these logs are backed up nightly. So if you request to have your logs deleted, do you really think an administrator is going back through every backup, and removing them?

obliged to delete all logs

> 'The decision (German) does not mean that T-Online is now obliged to delete all their IP-logs, the customers first need to complain.

Yes it does. Maybe not yet, but soon as German ISPs get these complaints by the hundreds daily the only way to handle the requests will be to just change their log retention policy and delete them all after n days.

Hacker Utopia

Who on earth needs anonymous proxy chains now? I'm off to Berlin.

So without logs...

Without logs, it seems it would be harder to track down network abuse (i.e. crackers). So you trade privacy for some protection from assholes. To me, that's a fair tradeoff, but what happens when the German courts demand that an ISP assist in some investigation and they can't because they've deleted certain logs (as the SAME courts told them they have to do)?

Seems like it puts the ISP between a very uncomfortable rock and a hard place.

In Soviet Russia...

In Soviet Russia, government orders ISP to delete logs!

Australia..

It should work in Australia. Privacy laws here state that:
- If I ask a company operating in Australia what information they have about me, they are obliged to tell me
- If I ask where they got this information, again they must answer
- If I ask the same company to remove such records, AFAIK they must, though there are reasonable exceptions to this one. (e.g. if i've done business with them, they have to keep financial records. if it's my bank, they might have to cancel the mortgage to comply..)
- Companies operating here are not supposed to pass on private information without consent, which is why so many competitions and things have clauses in tiny writing to get your consent.

Re:Australia..

You must be from America. Americans often send us Australians instruction manuals in German because they think everyone speaks German in Austraya.

Re:Motherfucking bureaucratic world...

Because: (a) some people commit actual crimes (like, the kind with victims) on the internet, and the ISP's logs are equivalent to the film from the CCTV camera across the street from a robbed bank; (b) there are good technical reasons, ie statistical data used for load-balancing purposes, network expansion, upgrade scheduling etc, for keeping logs (although obviously, stripping out identifying data ought to be done wherever this doesn't interfere with that purpose); (c) to some extent, keeping "logs" as such is an unavoidable consequence of doing what an ISP does. Functions like billing depend on logs. If they didn't keep logs, what recourse do you have if they bill you for 100GB over-quota usage during the month?

As with any other business you deal with, the difference between "monitoring customers" and "keeping business records" gets a bit blurry. A plumber keeps a "log" of whose house he visits, what he does in each house, what materials he uses, and how much he charges each householder. He probably calls this log a "receipt book". Obviously this book is unlikely to contain evidence of a crime, but that's due to the different nature of the plumber's business, not the fact that he keeps logs.