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EU Moves Forward with Data Retention

Posted by samzenpus on from the find-out-what-you-said-last-week dept.

KokoBonobo writes " euobserver.com reports on controversial proposals to require EU service operators to retain data about telephone calls and e-mails as part of an overall fight against crime and terrorism. The retained data would not only consist of logs, but of entire conversations and contents of the e-mails and SMS messages. This document from the European Commission's Information Society goes into further detail."

1 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. A few numbers by Spad · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For the sake of argument, ignoring phone records, etc and just focusing on the internet.

    There are over 100 million broadband users in the EU - plus countless milllions of dialup users - but we'll ignore the dialuppers too for the moment.

    Now I download about 300Gb/year and upload about half that. So we'll say about 400Gb/year of traffic. Now I know that they only have to log the traffic and not store everything I download/upload (although that would make for a more amusing example) so let's make it 1/10th of that actually required to log all my data (40Gb).

    That's 3.7 Exabytes of data per year for all the broadband users in the EU alone. Assuming they haven't changed the proposal too much since I last read it, they required storage of data for 7 years, that's ~26 Exabytes of storage required to hold all this stuff.

    How the hell do you find anything of use in 26 exabytes of data?