from Hacker News

Germany's blanket data retention law is illegal, EU top court says

by tyrion on 9/20/22, 1:17 PM with 174 comments

  • by Semaphor on 9/20/22, 2:09 PM

    Our data retention laws get overturned all the time. Usually already by our constitutional courts. Sadly our politicians don’t care much and don’t get punished, so they just try it again and again and again and usually it’s in effect for a while before the courts give judgement.

    I really can’t explain where Politikverdrossenheit (political apathy) comes from.

    edit: The last sentence is sarcasm

  • by therealmarv on 9/20/22, 7:57 PM

    hold on, what Germany wanted to do (blanket data retention) is a reality for a long time in other states in EU. There are many countries collecting for 6+ months all connection data (e.g. France or Spain). A map is in this German article from 2019

    https://netzpolitik.org/2019/vorratsdatenspeicherung-in-euro...

    So this becomes illegal in other EU member states now too? Does anybody have any inside how this will change EU data retention in general?

  • by omgomgomgomg on 9/20/22, 7:46 PM

    Yet another time Germany needs external intervention measures to get in line.

    Time and time again, history has proven everywhere that if the population does not keep their politicians in line, they will get drunk from all the power.The people do not even vote reasonably, so it is very difficult.

    Have these lawmakers ever presented good results which can be attributed to their work?

  • by karlerss on 9/20/22, 2:15 PM

  • by int_19h on 9/20/22, 8:11 PM

    There's a curious comment on that article from a person in support of that retention law:

    "Google can do that [blanket data collection], my Chinese mobile phone manufacturer too, why shouldn't the government be able to do it?"

    Something to ponder when we talk about data collection by private parties: like it or not, it does provide justification for governments doing the same.

  • by rmbyrro on 9/20/22, 2:16 PM

    Is the ECJ kind of a Supreme Court that can overturn member state laws and rulings?

    I had the impression member states were 100% sovereign within the EU...

  • by BlueTemplar on 9/20/22, 2:21 PM

    In related news, the EUropean Data Protection supervisory authorities are complaining that their budget isn't being significantly increased even as the complaints they have to process have exploded in the recent years :

    https://euobserver.com/tickers/156038

  • by that_guy_iain on 9/21/22, 7:58 AM

    Germany is a weird one. On one side of things, they really like their privacy. People will routinely upload pictures to instagram where they find their faces and faces of others for pictures they posed for. I don't get it, if you posed for a picture to go on Instagram why do you need your face covered?

    On other side of things the goverment does more data collection and data requests than nearly every other goverment. The goverment is super willing to record everything you do. While at the same time making it illegal for you to record someone without their knowledge.

  • by shadowgovt on 9/20/22, 4:31 PM

    Interesting that it was a German law. I was under the impression that German law was pretty conservative on data collection.

  • by rad_gruchalski on 9/20/22, 11:05 PM

    Let’s not forget: we are talking about a country where every visit to a new doctor results in having to sign a Datenschutz form in order to agree to data processing. This is a country where personal data supposed to be saint. Double standards.

  • by dane-pgp on 9/20/22, 1:38 PM

    I'd be interested to know if the EU law that the ECJ relied on differs from or goes further than the case law from the European Court of Human Rights that the UK is still a member of.

    A ruling against mass data retention in the UK could help Privacy International in their on-going case against the government for its mass surveillance and use of "bulk personal datasets".

    https://www.privacyinternational.org/long-read/4598/briefing...

  • by BlueTemplar on 9/20/22, 4:03 PM

    And laws about the data collection, collation, and usage by governments date quite a way back...

    For instance, the 1974 French SAFARI scandal,

    where the government wanted to build a centralized computer database that would collect country-wide administrative data, starting with the 400 (physical) police files, and IIRC with a single social security number for each citizen,

    has caused such an uproar that the project was abandoned and the data privacy regulator CNIL was soon created.

    (Note the totalitarianism (aka "high modernism") inherent in computers, by the way what they show tends to be accepted as truth, the way they don't have any common sense, the way their digital nature tends to classify people into strict categories, which then become set in stone by their limited capacity to forget, the way the free flow of information turns qualitative and how they give a lot of power to the State while democracies try to limit this power.)

    Sadly, we've recently seen its failure - caused in a big way by it being stripped of its power in 2004, leaving only a consultative (non-)power - in 2010 a law about "a general principle of information sharing between administrations" has still been created.

    Some notable worries are about the preceding 2007 law that authorized ethnic statistics - while personal data treatment using ethnic or racial data, and adding race and religion values in the administrative files are still forbidden - the potential of ethnic data becoming racial data is still very high.

    Another worry is about the genetic prints file : created in 2002 and first limited to sexual criminals, it has since been extended to a whopping 5% of the population, 87% of which have NOT (yet, quite a lot of the debate being how long these files should be kept) been condemned for the reason they got added to the file. It gets worse, and shows how quantitative can become qualitative : because genetic information is NOT independent between family members, a staggering third of the population ends up having its genetic identifiers at least partially stored in these files.

    A 2022 project (submission date ending 2 weeks ago) to interconnect the digital prints file with the criminal records file has mentioned a potential future project of connecting both with the generic prints file... (among others) with also a policemen-suggested requirement that "the solution be compatible with remote work [...] not requiring strong authentication".

  • by kurupt213 on 9/20/22, 6:38 PM

    I would think it’s also against the spirit of the bill of rights, yet here we are in America, with secret courts reviewing secret surveillance and meta data.

  • by layer8 on 9/20/22, 4:08 PM

    Note that the ruling defines a number of exemptions. See the text following “However, EU law does not preclude national legislation which” in the press release: https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...

    In particular, service providers will probably still have to maintain the infrastructure to activate “general and indiscriminate” data retention on demand.

  • by Tangurena2 on 9/20/22, 8:27 PM

  • by numlock86 on 9/20/22, 3:40 PM

    Is this from the same guys who want to get rid of cryptography for the public or at least get some backdoors?

  • by sva_ on 9/20/22, 5:38 PM

    I posted this earlier:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32909698

    I don't care about the points, just think it is a bit weird that a promotional commercial company post is now on the frontpage instead of a more neutral news site.

    Although now, Reuters would probably be the better source than what was available earlier today:

    https://www.reuters.com/technology/indiscriminate-data-reten...

  • by nonethewiser on 9/20/22, 4:10 PM

    Is Germany a sovereign country if an international court presides over them?

    This tends to get brushed aside by people defending the EU. Isn't this a step in the direction of the EU becoming something like the United States? There tends to be a lot of double-speak on this: "That's not true" and "it's a good thing" at the same time.