After years of debate over privacy issues, the EU decided today that mobile phone operators and ISPs must keep records of phone and email traffic. The new law was motivated by the Union's anti-terrorist campaign. Carriers must keep records for the previous year and ISPs are required to keep running records of the past six months of email data. Britain currently holds the rotating EU presidency and has been pushing harder for the data retention measures since the bombings in London earlier this year. Fifteen EU countries previously had no data retention laws, while Italy and Ireland requires telcos to keep records for up to four years. The two countries' laws will maintain the longer record keeping requirement.
For more on the EU's new data retention law:
- take a look at this report from EUpolitix.com