| German highest court orders stored telecoms data deletion |
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| March 02, 2010 |
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Telco data centres hold untold terabytes of telecoms information. Vast amounts of telephone and e-mail data held must be deleted.
The constitutional court overturned a 2008 law requiring communications data to be kept for six months.
The law which was designed to combat terrorism and serious crime, required telecoms companies to keep logs of calls, faxes, SMS messages, e-mails and internet use.
Nearly 35,000 Germans lodged complaints against it, arguing that the law violated their right to privacy.
Responding to the thousands of formal complaints, Germany's constitutional court described the law as a "particularly serious infringement of privacy in telecommunications".
However, it did not rule against data retention in principle.
The judgement was handed down even though the law specified that companies were not supposed to record telephone calls or to read any of the e-mail or SMS communications.
But the records would include evidence of who got in touch with whom, for how long and how often - without requiring any evidence of wrongdoing.
The judgement may be the prelude to a wave of further proceedings.
The country's minister for consumer rights recently criticised Google's Street View project and urged people to object to the publication of pictures of their homes on the internet, which many did. |
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