Re: [anti-spam-wg] Question about German laws

["Markus Stumpf" maex-lists-ripe-antispam-wg@localhost]

Hoi,

a little additon to what Michael wrote ...

On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 07:36:29PM +0100, Michael Horn wrote:
> This is correct - but it affects only the case of mr. voss - everybody
> else who wants their ip address not to be logged has to appeal in court
> against that.

The background is that German data protection and telecommunication laws
forbid storage of "personal" or "personalized" data (and an IP is seen
as that) unless it is needed for accounting. Especially with _flat rate_
broadband accounts there is no need for accounting and therefor there is
no need to save away connection information.
Generally this affects all German providers, however that case of Mr.
Voss was not a general one, but a very specialised, so this is not a
precedence per se.
In principle German law even forbids logfiles like the CLF used by
Apache, unless the visitor has expressed explicit approval.

I subscribe to Michael's view that this will change with the new EU
regulations and all the other - IMHO useless - "anti terror" provisions.
George Orwell was off a few years - but not too many ...

	\Maex