Unnecessary data retention measures are an incitement for unlawful access and Australia needs to follow examples set by the EU, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
IT IS A STINKER in terms of policy and unconvincing in effect, but the wholesale, indiscriminate retention of telecommunications data continues to excite legislators and law enforcement. In the European Union, countries continue to debate and pursue such measures, despite legal challenges.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), passed in 2016, limits the ways personal data is collected in terms of legitimate purposes. The European Court of Justice has also made it clear that the mass retention of phone and location data violates the EU's Charter of Fundamental Human Rights.
Despite this, EU member states continue to subvert, by varying degrees, such protections. Fixated by notions of protecting society from the unsavoury and the criminal, lawmakers continue to flirt and court the mass surveillance properties inherent in such regulations.
A neatly grim example of this arose in July when the Belgian Parliament passed laws mandating the retention of user data by telecommunications and internet providers. This was a second run by the Parliament, given the invalidation in April 2021 by the Belgian Constitutional Court of the previous data retention law. That particular statute permitted the storage of every Belgian's telecom, location and internet metadata for up to 12 months.
