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Originally Posted by Paul Delaney
The DPP would tell them not to use it for any reason as it would be of detriment to the prosecution case
Sorry, I think I'm missing something here, can you tell me where it states in the Communications Data Bill or the European Union's Data Retention Directive that ISP's are required to record the websites that their customers visit over a period of 12 months please?
The reason I ask is that I can't see them complying with that (definitely not the French ISP's) because of the sheer volume of data involved, the time it would take to collect and the space required to store it all. There is also the implementation problem in that ISP may only use their Deep Packet Inspection hardware for tasks relative to providing and maintaining an Internet Service like "traffic shaping" and not profiling their customers by monitoring the pages they visit. This is what Phorm is proposing and the Home Office have already stated that this can only be done with the explicit consent of the ISP's customers so any law which allowed the ISP's to collect this information willy-nilly would surely be a contradiction?
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Indeed, its a staggerng amount of data, but I noticed this comment.
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The internet log retention orders will also mandate the keeping of information on a user's activity but not the content of any communications.
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Now, IP allocation is not Internet activity as such. I always leave my router on, but turn off my PC's, so no browsing activity is going on. Does the above mean that this new law will require ISP's to also collect what URL's were visited in the last 12 months, and what email communications were made?
I hope not, but if it is true, Phorm will be a minor inconvenience compared to this little nugget.
I have looked at the actual directive itself, you can get a PDF of it from
here and it isn't that clear if I am honest. At the very least it would seem to indicate, as was mentioned in The Register article, that most ISP's are already doing this, the article therefore just appears to give a maximum time frame for the retention of such data. Whether it requires the storage of sites visited is not clear, that's one for the legal boffins here to decide.