Hi Ken, > I find it strange that someone visits my website, using > an IP address from an ISP's allocated IP address space, and > hypothetically I could through lawful means compel the ISP > to reveal to me account details like name and address of > the ISP customer corresponding to that IP address at the > time of the website visit. And is the court worried that > I can obtain those details, which are surely personal data? > No, the court is worried that I retain a logfile showing what > IP address visited my website.
Yeah, the whole issue is entirely absurd. The crux is: The GDPR-regulation and the German DSGVO are really ambiguous. They don't specify hard details, limits or present workable examples. Instead they wallow in generalizations. It's not just this regulation or law, but our lawmakers - in general - do it this way to prevent that a layman can understand the full scope of them by himself. It's then up to the courts to establish the cold and hard facts of what is allowable and what is not. It keeps our lawyers supplied with bread and butter, right? Not just this decade, but also the next. Take this ruling about "are IPs personal data" and the other ruling about the "7 day logfile retention". Both cases are entirely different and unrelated and deal with very specific circumstances unique to the respective cases. Each of the two court rulings apply to the specific case only. However: Any future court case with related circumstances will take them as a reference and will orient their own court ruling along those lines to avoid controversy. Say you have a legitimate reason to keep unredacted logfiles for longer than 7 days? If you can justify it, then you're welcome to try. But you need to be ready to be challenged in court to make your point. And as it's usually the case: It will not start and end at the district court. It goes through revisions and contestations and might go all the way up to the federal supreme court or even the European Supreme Court. That's a risk nobody in his right mind is willing to take, correct? So everyone is like "Ah, shit ..." and swallows the ridiculous 7 day rule because it's the safest way out, as *this* boundary has already been established. Not by law, but by court findings. > Not sure if it mattered that the website in the court case was a government > website. I think it wouldn't have mattered if it had been otherwise. Except that a semi-private blogger or a small business entity wouldn't have had the cash to contest the district court ruling all the way up to the federal supreme court. They would have taken the hit and would even have settled out of court just to avoid the bother. We have law firms in Germany that do nothing else but send warnings with penalties. Hoping the cases never end up in court. They are dancing in the street because of this ridiculous DSGVO will line their pockets without ends. > Also I am in the US, and here the most likely reason for serving an > ISP with a court order to obtain customer account details > corresponding to an IP address would be some sort of criminal activity > like trafficking in child porn, soliciting minors online for sex, > plotting a terrorist act, .... And the entity wanting the information > would be law enforcement. I guess everybody has stuff like Facebook > and Cambridge Analytica on the brain now, rather than kiddie porn or > terrorists. Or copyright trolls and bootleg music, that's ancient > history. > > Germany seems to be an outlier in all this, I saw an article recently > about Facebook "deletion centers" in Germany, with the largest one in > Berlin employing over 1,200 "content moderators". Yeah, I'm also shaking my head about all this, because these laws, rulings and practices are horribly ill thought out and ridiculous. Let's stay with the German example. Our "Grundgesetz" (which is our Ersatz-Constitution and a leftover from the occupation after WWII) regulates freedom of expression in Article 5: --------------------------------------------------------------- (1) Everyone has the right to freely express and disseminate his opinion in word, writing and image and to inform himself freely from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by radio and film are guaranteed. There is no censorship. (2) These rights find their limits in the regulations of the general laws, the legal regulations for the protection of the youth and in the right of the personal honour. (3) Art and science, research and teaching are free. Freedom of doctrine does not release us from loyalty to the Constitution. --------------------------------------------------------------- This sounds good on paper, but it didn't stand the test of time. For example the criminal law (StGB, especially ยง130) defines heavy penalties for racist, religious and ethnic defamation, attacks against human dignity, holocaust denial, calls for violence against individuals or groups and a whole host of other things. In theory this might be OK, but the problem is always the interpretation in court and often these days people are strung up for things they said that were perfectly acceptable a decade or two ago. Penalties range from 3 months to 5 years and include heavy fines. This leads to situations where rape of a minor might be charged with two years on probation and (actual example) a case where a 89 year old lady who denied parts of the holocaust just got four years in the slammer. I'm not defending her views in the least, but I wonder why "mental illness" and "sensitivity to incarceration" (yes, that is an actual thing!) is often used as an excuse to lower sentences, but in her case it's not. Here the state is willing to let someone die in prison because she's having an 'uncomfortable' or outright wrong opinion. In Germany Merkel's policy of unrestrained, unvetted and unlimited immigration of unqualified and even entirely undocumented "refugees" (which most of them are not) has lead to far spread dissent and the rise of a new political party who's actually the only one now in parliament that's actually against this madness. The "political" discourse has descended to levels of name calling and established parties are using methods against the new opposition which are right out of the handbook that the Communists and Nazis used against their political opponents, who aren't entirely free of blame either. So Facebook, Twitter and the comment section of online publications became battle zones between regime-supporters and the opposition, but also between neighbours, relatives and people without even a nodding acquaintance. Enter the "NetzDG"-law which is supposed to be directed against agitation and fake messages (Fake News) in social networks. And 'deletion centers'. > Having "deletion centers" seems very Orwellian. It sure is! It's right out of the Nazi or Communist handbook if you ask me. > I'm not sure which is more disturbing, the fact that we have > government mandated deletion centers, or that social media > has so much objectionable content that we need deletion centers. Indeed! Now here is the total absurdity of this NetzDG-law that did lead to these deletion centers: Imagine someone says something that *might* be illegal or criminally punishable on Facebook. What would the normal and 'intelligent' way be to deal with that? How about this: Someone calls the police, the police investigates, collects the evidence, hands the case to the prosecutor and it goes to court. The court decides if it's a criminal offense or covered by free speech and the offender also gets his right to 'habeas corpus' and the opportunity to defend himself with the help of a qualified defense council. How the NetzDG made it: Outsourced hired help at some subcontractor of Facebook now scans Facebook comments and posts. Within 2-5 seconds the hired help (on minimum wage) has to decide if that message or comment is "OK" or not. If it's not, it's deleted and/or the "offender" is punished with a ban ranging from a 24h suspension to a complete suspension from the platform. If *you* as a user have a problem with that, then you can sue Facebook on your own time and dime. Now *IF* someone really said something illegal? In *that* case Facebook just aided and abetted a criminal by covering up evidence, hiding the offense from public view *and* from prosecution. Someone please tell me why *that* is the new 'normal', as I don't get it. German federal law says: "There is no censorship" and that we do have the right to freely express ourselves. Both are thinly veiled lies, devalued in subordinate criminal laws or government demanded and corporately enforced censorship. Same with the DSGVO: You are being criminalized for sharing client data with third parties - even if it was an accident. Local governments still retain the ability to share all your data with commercial third entities such as the GEZ (television billing provider), Schufa (commercial credit rating agency) or collecting agencies. Likewise: Google and Apple still track every move our smartphones make, Amazon.de (the German subsidiary) still has my *entire* shopping history since 2002 stored (including for items whose warranty expired 16 years ago) and nobody has a problem with *that*. But every mom-and-pop-coffee-shop now has to sanitize server logfiles after seven days and has to pro-actively document their full GDPR/DSGVO compliance. Why is that so? The book "Animal Farm" has the answer: "Some pigs are more equal than others." /shrug -- With best regards Michael Stauber _______________________________________________ Blueonyx mailing list Blueonyx@mail.blueonyx.it http://mail.blueonyx.it/mailman/listinfo/blueonyx