European Directive on Data Retention

From Seenoevil

In December 2005 the European Parliament approved the ‘’’Data Retention Directive’’’, which was also approved by the Council of Ministers in February 2006 [1]. The directive states that telecommunication companies and ISPs should store all electronic communications including location data on calls, SMS and Internet use calls for a total of 24 months. In the case of commercial data retention, the data retained will usually be on transactions and web sites visited. This also includes the retention of unsuccessful calls.

The directive covers traffic and location data generated by telephony, SMS and Internet, but not the content of the information communicated. This data should be used for 'specified forms' of serious criminal offences such as terrorism and organized crime but not for 'prevention'. As a further check, each national government is committed to establish an independent authority responsible for monitoring the use of the data.[2]

As far as the proposed law on extreme pornography goes, this means that there will be record of who visits what sites kept for 2 years.