Australia telcos warn: Opening metadata access will create a 'honeypot' for lawyers Australia's telecoms industry advocacy body the Communications Alliance is renewing its push for the federal government to revise its data retention regime, amid fears that a review will see stored data sucked into civil lawsuits. The take-out-the-trash timing of the review, announced in the afternoon of Friday December 23, …
> The take-out-the-trash timing of the review, announced in the afternoon of Friday December 23, meant Vulture South missed it at the time.
Not quite. I emailed Simon with the ag.gov.au link on 23 Dec and he replied with a link to this saying we're on it.
Glad it's being picked up in its own right though. It seems to my reading to be just waiting to be abused. It doesn't take too much imagination for some jilted partner who knows the WiFi password to ensure some less tasteful/borderlining illegal websites make an appearance in the ISP logs and then use that in some custody hearings to argue why the other should not be allowed near kids. It is also not beyond imagination that a business partner wanting to escape some contract responsibility could generate the appearance of SMTP traffic to a recipient which wound strongly indicate that confidentiality clauses had been breached.
My 2c. The retention policy is an expensive way of generating large haystacks and it should be scrapped. My visits to el Reg or any other site are not in my ISP logs. Only connections to my VPNs endpoints, and they don't log. Legislators should try harder to understand the systems they are trying to regulate and stop with the do something brigade logic. Otherwise we end up with π == 3 laws.
Data Retention has nothing to do with web-browsing.
Your VPN changes absolutely nothing to the data that is retained under Data Retention about your service.
Your SMTP story is incoherent.
Apparently you have been misinformed.
I would advise: think about who has led you to believe this nonsense: now remember who they are and treat their opinions and assertions with greater scepticism next time.
"The Register would note, however, that agencies probably love at least some 'thing' data – for example, electricity metering to help them spot hydroponics labs producing weed"
When I worked in the electricity industry, the vast majority of the grow houses had their energy-hungry lamps & heaters connected up to an entirely illegal circuit that hooked in upstream of the meter - just a little rubber glove work for someone not completely technically illiterate.
That was twenty years ago, so maybe kidz these daze ain't so smart?
"The Register would note, however, that agencies probably love at least some "thing" data – for example, electricity metering to help them spot hydroponics labs producing weed."
The Register would note, however, that it absolutely does not understand what metadata is.
Metadata is an information about connection. It does not contain any "thing" data and as such smart meter in hydroponics lab will produce exactly same metadata as smart meter in a usual household, which is information about connection to provider, no more, no less.
Yeah, but dealing with Data Retention in a factual way wouldn't provide the opportunity to wallow in paranoia and revel in spreading FUD.
Parking meters - a government-owned meter would not be subject to the Act. A private meter, assuming it dialled on-demand for each ticket it prints out, would generate a long list of connections. When I think about where I park in the morning - about 500 spaces, about 5 meters. So Data Retention would cause to be created 5 records, each with about 100 lines in it. So about 100KB of data. Compressed for storage, this would be about 10KB. Data deduplication could reduce this to 2KB.
"Enormous amount of data"? You could only believe this if you were entirely ignorant of the topic. But enthusiastic about spreading FUD.
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