The underlying principle of the initiative is to abolish the general and undifferentiated storing of traffic and location data in the electronic communications sector.
This measure seeks to accommodate the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union and, in concrete terms it means that telephone operators are no longer allowed to simply store all meta data. Storing will be monitored more rigorously and will have to be undertaken in a more targeted manner. Exceptional cases will be listed in the legal texts.
According to Minister Tanson the goal of the new legal text is to create a balance, noting for instance that national security has to be guaranteed and that in some cases data storage is necessary in order to fight serious crimes. At the same time, citizens’ rights have to be protected, said the Greens politician. She lamented that opinions on the subject by EU member states differ too much to create a universal regulation.
Speaking at the briefing, Tanson said that “it is no longer the case that data can be stored without differentiation. Exceptions will only be made according to European jurisprudence and for specific categories of data. Some types of data can be stored but only for a specific amount of time. Civic identity data and IP addresses can be stored in undifferentiated manner.”
