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back to article IP Freely? ECJ to rule on privacy rules for dynamic IP addresses

The European Court of Justice has been asked to rule on the issue of whether or not dynamic IP addresses constitute private data. The request comes from a national German court in relation to a case where the plaintiff claims that "storage of dynamic IP addresses" assigned to him breach his data protection rights. Under EU …

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  1. Semtex451
    Thumb Up

    Well done plaintiff

    High time too

    8 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "if expressly needed to provide the service requested"

    Of course your ISP needs to store your current IP adress somewhere, but to store all of your previous adresses really would be a breach of privacy...

    14 0 Reply
    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: "if expressly needed to provide the service requested"

      It's not just the ISP. It affects all service providers, especially aggregate ones like the advertisers, who can and do associate an IP address with a specific individual rather than using one-way hashes for the value of a session.

      3 0 Reply
  3. Colin Miller

    Web server log

    Does that that webservers physically located in the EU must not log the requestor's IP address and the requested URL, as that is personally identifying information?

    Except where the website is under going ACTIVE debugging, and the log is needed for that.

    0 0 Reply
  4. Daggerchild Silver badge

    The Court demands that you hand over the IP addresses of your users.

    The Court also demands that you do not log this data.

    10 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      hmmm

      I think you've summed it up nicely.

      1 0 Reply
  5. Rhisiart

    Business Purposes

    An ISP would have to demonstrate a legitimate business purpose for keeping historical data and to be honest one doesn't spring to mind, however most of this stuff is just captured automatically and nobody bothers to delete it. What the plaintiff should realise is while the court might rule that retention of this data by the ISP is a breach of privacy, if the relevant authorities believe that retaining this data is required for legitimate law enforcement purposes the data will simply be add to the relevant orders issued to ISPs and it would be retained that way

    1 0 Reply

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