Slashdot Mirror
Swedish ISP Deletes Customer ID Info
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A Swedish internet service provider, Bahnhof, has begun deleting customer identification information in order to prevent it from being used as evidence against its customers under Sweden's new legislation against copyright infringement via peer-to-peer file sharing. According to this report on 'The Local,' it is entirely legal for it to do so. The company's CEO, Jon Karlung, is identified as 'a vociferous opponent of the measures that came into force on April 1st,' and is quoted saying that he is determined to protect the company's clients, and that 'It's about the freedom to choose, and the law makes it possible to retain details. We're not acting in breach of IPRED; we're following the law and choosing to destroy the details.'"
Buy the guy who made that decision a beer. Kudos, Bahnhof.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
And sometimes heroes get arrested and thrown in jail for obstructing justice.
I hope this won't be like what happens in the US where the company deletes data, but when pressured by the courts, they happen to recover a backup.
greed@All_Evils:~#
They take care of their customers and can still run after a nuclear war. (and you know some guy in there is doing the maniacal laugh every once in a while) http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/15/inside-the-james-bond-villain-data-center/
Judging by the recent trial of TPB, following the letter of the law in Sweden is not enough to defend yourself if the case ends up in court.
The company's CEO, Jon Karlung, is identified as 'a vociferous opponent of the measures that came into force on April 1st'
I'm not a fan of the new slashdot achievement system, either.
I'm moving to Sweden.
Anyone want to hire me?
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
They are actually claiming to follow another law from 2003 called the Swedish Electronic Communications law. It states that traffic information should be deleted or anonymized when it is no longer needed to transmit the electronic message.
My other comment is funny
... and you'll be charged with destruction of evidence, and obstruction of justice, and almost assuredly, they'll think you complicit, because silence = guilt here.
Even if the copyright police came, they'd have a hard time breaking in to the coolest Bond villain data center in the world.
...this could be a publicity stunt.
Nobody cares though WHY they're doing it as long as they are ACTUALLY doing it.
Anyways, Kudos to Bahnhof!
There is a fine line between merely caring for your customers and helping them get away with wrongs (be that wrong a crime or just a civil offense).
It is surprising, that it is legal, and they may be mistaken too — The Pirate Bay crew was just sentenced to a year in jail, however long them claimed, they did "nothing wrong".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Here's a funny video with Jon Karlung in his super villain lair :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwlATf9xse4
Offer prepaid internet access. It could be cost-effective for a new player in either a densely populated area without high-rises, or in the boonies using WiFi and clever antennae.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Last time we checked, Sweden's Computer [DB] Law required anyone, who creates a database of other individuals' details to get a license & comply with certain restrictions on use, etc.
This ISP could argue they don't want to violate that or a related law (or, possibly, that they don't want to have a license, so they dump the data on individuals' usage, etc.
Well, these guys have a nuclear bunker for a data-center, they probably think that even if the government comes and attacks them, they can just ride it out inside. They'll probably survive even if US decides to blast them with a nuke (I wonder what the rest of the world would think of the USA if that happened though - US blasting an entrance into a datacenter with a thermo-nuclear weapon in a populated Swedish area. Oh well, just pretend there are WMDs in there and anything would go...
You can't handle the truth.
in 3... 2... 1...
Wtf? Their name means "railway station" in German...
Preview of next months news:
Swedish authorities discover that ISPs deleting cutomer ID info has led to them being unable to determine the ID of file sharers, but also child pornographers, terrorists, people threatening suicide, etc.
New laws will be up for debate trying to outlaw deleting this kind of customer ID info, with privacy groups outraged.
(Not advocating anything here, just figuring this is where this is going.)
They use dynamic IP-addresses and do not refresh them unless there's good reason.
You can choose to renew your IP address any time you choose though.
It's a really neat system and I really hope the data storage directive fails and that I can switch to them.
Cause they are awesome.
After I'd submitted the article, I was contacted by a spokesman for Bahnhof who advised me that they hadn't just "begun" deleting the customer linkage information, that they have been doing it all along. So the report in "The Local" was not exactly accurate.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
your response appears as "New Swedish Data Retension Lawl" when shortened
also, it's retention :-p
Oh, fuck me, that's embarrassing. And now it's +5 Insightful. I love the spotlight!
Unfortunately I can't read Swedish. Anyone know if they offer VPN service?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Apart from the obvious heroism, there's that business angle, where everyone who wants to use p2p will want to shift to this ISP. Instant customer base boost.
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
Seriously.
All they did is to provide an infrastructure for file sharing. There is nothing wrong with sharing files. It only becomes illegal once criminals use an infrastructure to share copyrighted material.
Just so, this ISP is guilty of providing an infrastructure that criminals might use. Just like the municipality provides roads for bank robbers to drive over. The whole internet is guilty of the same!
Deleting customer records though, is the same as were someone at the traffic department to suddenly start wiping tape recordings from CCTV cameras in order to protect criminals. This is, IMHO way more criminal than what TPB did.
One might argue that TPB did nothing to prevent copyright theft on behalf of the copyright holders. They might have been more conscientious about removing links to known copyrighted songs or videos for example. On the other hand, it may equally be argued that they are a third party to the theft, and preventing such theft was not their responsibility.
At least they did not destroy records- there were none to destroy
- The Louse
US Libraries started doing something similar after the passing of the Patriot Act: deleting customer's borrowing history so that their information couldn't be subpoenaed for the data by the government.
A fairly recent round of laws to come into play for all EU member states specifies that data like this must be retained for 6months.
But fuck the legality of it, he may be in the wrong legally, but he's one of the few ISPs in the right morally. It's just a shame more wont stand up across the industry and do this.
I find it odd that the EU recognises that storing people's DNA on a DNA database when they're innocent and haven't been convicted of any crime is clearly wrong, but that on the flip side of it they support the storage of what people did and where on the internet.... even if people are innocent and haven't been convicted of any crime.
It's just a shame they don't understand technology and the implications of their decisions related to it as well as they do real world justice.
Summary got it wrong - AGAIN! They haven't started deleting logs, they've been doing it that way since 1994. This story has been out for a couple days and somehow - in typical Internet fashion - one person got it wrong and everyone else has copied the wrong data. They never saved this data from the beginning because they didn't have to. It's only mentioned now that they're continuing to do what they've done all alone, not that the suddenly started doing something different.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
He's also the CEO of that amazing James Bond Villan style data centre. Forward thinking all around I guess.
Oh, fuck me, that's embarrassing. And now it's +5 Insightful. I love the spotlight!
Its a highly appropriate grammar mix-up - their would indeed be a "retensioning" as in tightening down the screws.
I used to know a guy who made those kinds of ontopic grammatical errors all the time. I would really like to know if there is a name for them - kind of like mondegreen.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I ACCIDENTALLY THE WHOLE LOG
It may be some kind of "requirement" for EU member states, but does the EU override the actual laws of Sweden, which he is following? I have a feeling that only Sweden itself can impose its laws on him. At the very least, he seems willing to find out.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
Yeah, I'm confused, too. 2006/24/EG is pretty clear that the source of a internet message has to be identifiable for at least 6 month.
OTOH, there's a lawsuit pending against the directive in Ireland and the German constitutional court has granted a temporary injunction against it*, so it maybe not all is lost. It's pretty controversial politically.
* Except in cases of serious crimes, which is how they were able to bust a child porn ring recently. Next thing you know the 5 major German ISPs sign a contract to implement a internet blacklist. Great timing!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Correcting myself here, but on further reading I've just found out that the Irish lawsuit was denied in February. Bummer!!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
This is the ISP that has the fancy underground data center.
http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/
The European Socialist thing to do would be to begin creating reports against all the customers you thought were in violation due to their bandwidth usage.
What this ISP is doing is pro-privacy so it is anti-socialist.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/15/inside-the-james-bond-villain-data-center/ It seems like these folks have a lot going for them. There is the sensible management, a cool place to work, etc.
It's a pun.
I'd love to pretend otherwise, but was really just a lucky typo. Thus the mondegreen discussion above.
What happens is that the EU comes up with "Directives", whcih are not laws, but rather binding instructions which each country must implement as their own law. This eliminates translation issues, and off-loads the burden of integrating it with each legal system onto that country. Of course, it does have the flip-side that tedious and burdensome directives are often ignored (France is a champion at ignoring directives it doesn't like). I have no idea if this particular directive is Sewdish law, yet, or whether they can get away with it as written.
[FUCK BETA]
Another Swedish ISP (Alltele.se) has now done the same thing.
The CEO Ola Norberg called the new police methods a
absurd witch hunt on their honest customers.
Send an e-mail and tell him how much you appriciate this, ola.norberg@alltele.se
There is justice as in "for everyone", and there is justice as in "for just us".
Probably the latter is what you are referring to (sadly).
Where do I sign up for their service ?
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
He says they'll destroy the data, I dunno... somewhere along the line statements like that can look bad.
Maybe saying 'we simply don't log it as it's not necessary for our business model, and costs actually go up tracking all of this, when we'd rather keep prices down for our customer base' would have been a better way of saying it.
But regardless, cheers to this guy.
A fairly recent round of laws to come into play for all EU member states specifies that data like this must be retained for 6months.
It really is amazing how changing a single line in a config file is all that is needed to make an action legal or illegal.
You are probably correct in the interpretation of deleting said data is illegal. We can even assume it is as a 'worst case' assumption, since I do not know for sure either.
However, _Not_ logging said data in the first place means no deleting was done, and it is not illegal.
Now i realize the article linked here was factually wrong, in that this ISP is not deleting any logs, they just simply are not logging that data, and it has been for a lil while now (Unsure how long, but was definitely done before today and before TPB trial started)
I just find it funny that if you don't make a mistake, you are fine, if you make a mistake, you are fine, but if you make a mistake and fix it, its a crime.
It's not a law in Sweden yet. That is beeing worked on as we speak though.
I meant that "on-topic grammatical errors" are puns, if intentional. I wasn't being particularly serious.
I'd argue authorial intent matters, though. Accidental puns deserve their own word.