[Clips] Europe's Plan to Track Phone and Net Use

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Tue Feb 20 07:57:58 PST 2007


<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/business/worldbusiness/20privacy.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print>

The New York Times





February 20, 2007

Europe's Plan to Track Phone and Net Use

By VICTORIA SHANNON

PARIS, Feb. 19 - European governments are preparing legislation to require
companies to keep detailed data about people's Internet and phone use that
goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European
Union directive.

In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially
prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the
standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.

A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European
Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records
of a caller's precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.

Even now, Internet service providers in Europe divulge customer information
- which they normally keep on hand for about three months, for billing
purposes - to police officials with legally valid orders on a routine
basis, said Peter Fleischer, the Paris-based European privacy counsel for
Google. The data concerns how the communication was sent and by whom but
not its content.

But law enforcement officials argued after the terrorist bombings in Spain
and Britain that they needed better and longer data storage from companies
handling Europe's communications networks.

European Union countries have until 2009 to put the Data Retention
Directive into law, so the proposals seen now are early interpretations.
But some people involved in the issue are concerned about a shift in policy
in Europe, which has long been a defender of individuals' privacy rights.

Under the proposals in Germany, consumers theoretically could not create
fictitious e-mail accounts, to disguise themselves in online auctions, for
example. Nor could they use a made-up account to use for receiving
commercial junk mail. While e-mail aliases would not be banned, they would
have to be traceable to the actual account holder.

"This is an incredibly bad thing in terms of privacy, since people have
grown up with the idea that you ought to be able to have an anonymous
e-mail account," Mr. Fleischer said. "Moreover, it's totally unenforceable
and would never work."

Mr. Fleischer said the law would have to require some kind of identity
verification, "like you may have to register for an e-mail address with
your national ID card."

Jvrg Hladjk, a privacy lawyer at Hunton & Williams, a Brussels law firm,
said that might also mean that it could become illegal to pay cash for
prepaid cellphone accounts. The billing information for regular cellphone
subscriptions is already verified.

Mr. Fleischer said: "It's ironic, because Germany is one of the countries
in Europe where people talk the most about privacy. In terms of
consciousness of privacy in general, I would put Germany at the extreme
end."

He said it was not clear that any European law would apply to e-mail
providers based in the United States, like Google, so anyone who needed an
unverified e-mail address - for political, commercial or philosophical
reasons - could still use Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail addresses.

Mr. Hladjk said, "It's going to be difficult to know which law applies."
Google requires only two pieces of information to open a Gmail account - a
name and a password - and the company does not try to determine whether the
name is authentic.

In the Netherlands, the proposed extension of the law on phone company
records to all mobile location data "implies surveillance of the movement
of large amounts of innocent citizens," the Dutch Data Protection Agency
has said. The agency concluded in January that the draft disregarded
privacy protections in the European Convention on Human Rights. Similarly,
the German technology trade association Bitkom said the draft there
violated the German Constitution.

Internet and telecommunications industry associations raised objections
when the directive was being debated, but at that time their concerns were
for the length of time the data would have to be stored and how the
companies would be compensated for the cost of gathering and keeping the
information. The directive ended up leaving both decisions in the hands of
national governments, setting a range of six months to two years. The
German draft settled on six months, while in Spain the proposal is for a
year, and in the Netherlands it is 18 months.

"There are not a lot of people in Germany who support this draft entirely,"
said Christian Spahr, a spokesman for Bitkom. "But there are others who are
more critical of it than we are."

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





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