Tag: data retention

Posted on

Unhappy data retention day

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

This morning, Australia’s mandatory 2 year data retention regime began. Internet activity through Australian ISPs (including mobile phone providers) is now recorded. Australians, according to Crikey, here is what is likely to be retained about your accessing this link today:

  • your name and similar identifying details on your Internet account
  • the Internet address of where you accessed Hoyden About Town from
  • the Internet address of Hoyden About Town itself
  • the date and time you accessed this site
  • how long you accessed it for (quickly, in the case of websites, no doubt, but what if you were Skyping with us?)
  • what technical services you used (HTTP over ADSL or mobile or cable or …)

If you are accessing this over a mobile device, your location is also stored, to quite a high degree of accuracy. This data is also by far the hardest to conceal using any method, since it’s revealed as a core part of your phone’s communication with cell towers.

At least the actual specific page you accessed would not (or at least need not) be retained, if I am interpreting the information at Allens and Crikey correctly.

Surveillance cameras attached to a building exterior
Surveillance, by Jonathan McIntosh CC BY-SA

Further reading:

Image credit: Surveillance by Jonathan McIntosh, Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike.

Posted on

Quick links: nothing to hide

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Data retention is coming to Australia very soon.

[Data retained] includes your name, address and other identifying information, your contract details, billing and payment information. In relation to each communication, it includes the date, start and finish times, and the identities of the other parties to the communication. And it includes the location data, such as the mobile cell towers or Wi-Fi hotspots you were accessing at the time…

But surely they’ve included special protections for communications between doctors and patients, and lawyers and clients? No. Never even discussed…

The Joint Committee recommended that the Act be amended to ensure that the metadata can’t be obtained by parties in civil litigation cases (I’ve mentioned before how excited litigation lawyers will be about all this lovely new data), and George Brandis said that would be fixed in the final amendments. But it isn’t there. The final Bill being bulldozed through Parliament right now contains no such protection. The fact remains that, under the Telecommunications Act, one of the situations in which a service provider cannot resist handing over stored data is when a court has required it by issuing a subpoena. In practice, that means that your ex-spouse, former business partners, suspicious insurance company or employer can get hold of a complete digital history of your movements and communications for the past two years, and use it against you in court.

Michael Bradley, Our privacy is about to be serially infringed, The Drum, March 19 2015

Surveillance cameras attached to a building exterior
Surveillance, by Jonathan McIntosh@Flickr CC BY-SA

Noted elsewhere: all this data will be stored by various companies with varying degrees of security awareness, so in practice it will sometimes be available to some criminals too.

Elsewhere:

Image credit: Surveillance by Jonathan McIntosh, Creative Commons Atttribution-Sharealike