Australian ISPs Not Ready For Mandatory Data Retention (abc.net.au)

ferrisoxide.com writes: October 13 marks the day Australian ISPs are required by law to track all web site visits and emails of their users, but according to an article on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's news site the majority of ISPs are not ready to begin mandatory data retention. The article's author, Will Ockenden, had previously released his own metadata to readers in an experiment to see how effectively this kind of data reveals personal habits of online users. The majority of Australians appear unconcerned with this level of scrutiny of their lives, given the minimal reaction to this and proposed tougher legislation designed to deal with the threats of crime and terrorism.

Comments

Unconcerned with this level of scrutiny?

[DrNico]

I don't know that we Australians were "unconcerned with this level of scrutiny of their lives" so much as constantly distracted by horror at the continual appalling actions, stuff ups and general inability to govern of the Abbott government. Given a few moments to think about things other than government officials chartering helicopters to go to party functions, rape and other abuses of asylum speakers in our care, blackmailing of the academic community to support legislation, an incompetent Minister for Defence amongst many others ministers, bashing of the Muslim community, awarding Prince Philip a knighthood, abuse of the Royal Commission system to go after political adversaries, attacks on the state broadcaster for not towing the line, and on and on every week for 2 years, then perhaps we'd have had time to kick up a fuss about data retention. Now that Abbott has been kicked out by his own party we'll have a chance to have a proper think about data retention and what it means, though it's probably too late.

Small ISP

[jellomizer]

My real issue is globally the loss of the small ISP. Back in the dialup days even outside major cities, we had access to dozens of ISP's we could pick the big global names just as AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve. But we we had access to a bunch of smaller ISP's who may have offered less services, but also were more affordable. 56.6k dial up for $8.50 a month was a good deal, or $20 for 100 Megabytes with no backout, there was also pricing like $25 for 50 hours. There were a lot of options and we could pick a style that was best for us. The ISP could offer these low prices (at the time) because they needed to cover the cost of a T1 line (about $1,000 a month) and x amount of LAN Lines, usually between 8-24. They could run the ISP with a small business of 1 person. They were not responsible for what their users did, or what they viewed. Nor did they really care to try, as logging all such traffic would fill up expensive Drive storage, which they often would rather keep for email and personal web hosting.

Today ISP also own the infrastructure and have increasing requirements which makes them more expensive and worse customer experience.