Top EU Court Says Phone Data Cannot Be Held 'Indiscriminately' (reuters.com) 10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Union's top court ruled on Tuesday that national authorities cannot retain phone data in a "general and indiscriminate" manner, but could use specific information to tackle some very serious crime. The court ruled on a case brought by the Supreme Court in Ireland where a man sentenced in 2015 to life imprisonment for murder appealed, saying the court of first instance had wrongly admitted traffic and location data of telephone calls as evidence.
The Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the EU (ECJ) on Tuesday said it was up to a national court there to decide whether the evidence was allowed. But it also said the bloc's members cannot have laws in place that would allow crime prevention through the "general and indiscriminate" retention of such data. Some circumstances, such as particularly serious crime regarded as a threat to national security, could justify data retention but only in a narrower scope or for a limited time.
The Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the EU (ECJ) on Tuesday said it was up to a national court there to decide whether the evidence was allowed. But it also said the bloc's members cannot have laws in place that would allow crime prevention through the "general and indiscriminate" retention of such data. Some circumstances, such as particularly serious crime regarded as a threat to national security, could justify data retention but only in a narrower scope or for a limited time.
I hate data retention indefinitely. (Score:3)
I am not really concerned about how much data places collect. I am sure I am in the minority, but I live a crime free life.
And I am not very interesting, just a data point.
But I will support limits, as long as there are NO exceptions.
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I am not really concerned about how much data places collect.
You don't have to be a criminal for overly broad data retention to impact you. What if the authorities want a cellphone company to report every subscriber that was in the area of interest on a specific day in 2015. You happened to be downtown, six blocks away from the robbery, but your cell was talking on the cell that covered the area. Now the authorities come to visit you and ask "Why were you downtown in that area at 1017am on June 14, 2015?"
Personally, I don't remember where I went on that date and I
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Just hope you never happen to be within 1km of some serious crime, and get caught up in the investigation because the cops decided to round up everyone whose phone data says they were nearby.
It's a lot like mass DNA testing, which thankfully has largely been abandoned now. The police used to ask everyone in an area to "volunteer" their DNA, and anyone who refused immediately became a suspect.
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Why only phone data? (Score:3)
Why can't they force expiration or use restrictions on ALL user data? It'd simplify applying the rules. And I assume lots of other data is just as personal and damning is phone records.
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It does apply to all data. This is just the court weighing in on this particular case. It is significant to address this particular case as many countries had old laws about collecting phone data, from before the more general EU privacy laws.
Remember in the EU, courts do not make rules. They just interpret them. The rules are already there, and are pretty simple.
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The way the EU works is that it creates rules, but then each member state has to implement them in its laws. The EU then monitors the implementation, and if necessary this court decides if the implementation is correct.
To have forced expiration would require the EU to create new rules. In this case the court is just interpreting the existing rules which give people a right to privacy and the police a legitimate reason to store data for longer periods in certain limited circumstances. Bulk collection and lon
Just store it outside of EU (Score:2, Insightful)
Soon, if it was not in place already, there will secret agreements to copy the EU phone data to the US, where it will be stored indefinitely.
normalized (Score:2)
It's upsetting that the discussion is normalized into accepting they collect all the data, and the argument is for how long they can store all the data. Welcome to the machine.