German ISP Forced To Delete IP Logs 202
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.'"
A question for network admins (Score:5, Interesting)
Australia.. (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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:But no privacy in the land of the free (Score:1, Interesting)
The US is somewhere in between. Sure, the US constitution contains what has for the best part of a century now been recognised as a right to privacy, but the Supreme Court put a wall up around this in the 1980s by saying that surveillance of the kind that would be possible with the naked eye in a public street is constitutionally ok (after all, a Police officer standing there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week could observe that stuff, right). Not really an apt comparison for the purposes of IP logging, but demonstrative of the failure of the US courts to keep up with the pace of change.
Re:Motherfucking bureaucratic world... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Good and bad. (Score:1, Interesting)
Also, what if a spammer signs up, requests all logs to be deleted
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
Re:The way it should be. (Score:2, Interesting)
Disclaimer: By "logs" I don't mean record of what web sites were surfed and what files downloaded, I mean record of what customer had X IP address at Y time.
Re:The way it should be. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The way it should be. (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/landmark/ [eff.org]
The video in question can be downloaded on BitTorrent at
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3537369/2003_Inside_L
Sarcastic comment explained (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry for reading TFA...
Re:Sarcastic comment explained (Score:3, Interesting)
You would hope that would be a crime in itself.