Photo: Bruno Girin on Flickr.
So the European Unions Data Retention directive is moving on and will soon be up for voting in the Swedish parliament. I wrote a short note about this here back in September.
So what does this mean? It means that all ISP’s and telecom carriers will have to save traffic data linked to specific subscribers and hand it over to the police when requested. This will lead to several things:
1) All you internet habits “are belong to” the police.
2) All your phone usage data “are belong to” the police.
3) All you phone positioning data “are belong to” the police.
In other words, you will be constantly tracked when you surf, when you IM, when you read e-mail, when you call your mom, when you call your work, when you’re in your car with your phone turned off, when you’re at a political meeting carrying your phone, when you’re on an airplane, when you’re in a bus, when you go to the toilet, when you… hrrm.. you get the picture… whatever you do, your actions will be registered and stored in a huge database.
I would really appreciate any comments on the proportionality on this from people that think it’s a good idea as I can’t come up with any arguments to train against. Just don’t say “terrorists!” or “think about the children!” as those has been broken a long time ago.
Patrik Fältström (paf) summarize what I feel quite nicely in the end of his blogpost about this:
That people at this point in time is like in SvD arguing about who’s fault it is while pushing and not stopping and thinking, is embarrassing.
Embarrassing for Sweden, embarrassing for the people working with IT Policy, and embarrassing for the people that have their names connected to quotes in the newspapers.
Not many of them even know who is responsible to do what according to the legislation. But they still push for it. An unclear legislation, implementation of a directive that does not lead to harmonization.
I know we can do better in Sweden. Or else we should just give up.
I know we can do better in Sweden. Or else we should just give up.
UPDATE: Fixed a link to paf’s blog.
