Telstra wants civil litigants to pay up front for access to metadata Telstra has put a new wrinkle on Australia's simmering data retention debate by suggesting that it charges for access to retained telecommunications sought by civil litigants. The suggestion is found in Telstra's submission to the government inquiry into whether retained telecommunications data should be made available in …
Lets see..
- Employers seeking to sue an employee who leaks to news media
- Employers suing whistle-blowers
- Defamation litigation
- Injury Insurance claims
- Traffic infringements (sms while driving comes to mind)
- Stalking/AVO
Divorce is now no fault, so no need to go to the expense of proving infidelity
Accidents, including workplace accidents.
The Australian Lawyers Alliance says,
"22. Data outlined in s187AA is currently available to parties to civil proceedings pursuant
to a subpoena or court order in any number of circumstances. Our members (the
majority of whom are personal injury lawyers) currently access metadata routinely
in civil proceedings as needed, depending on the facts in issue in the case. "
After all, the government imposed a huge cost to ISPs by requiring them to keep all this data. Initially it was promised that it would be for criminal investigations, but as expected, the scope has crept to include this also.
Keeping and retrieving the metadata is far from cost neutral, so the ISPs are absolutely justified in asking for users to pay for it.
I did a few sums 2 years ago and my conclusion was that assuming I had good data deduplication and compression, I could keep 1 year of Australia's data retained under the Data Retention Act on a $150 USB HDD from Dick Smith.
And seeing as the Telcos were already keeping this stuff, it's not clear how this would have any impact on them.
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