Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.)
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 :)
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).
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.
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.