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Soon no Gmail in Germany?  (View post)

hebbet [PersonRank 10]

Sunday, November 11, 2007
16 years ago6,940 views

Maybe Google close down Gmail in Germany
more infos in the German GWB http://www.googlewatchblog.de/2007/11/10/vorratsdatenspeicherung-beschlossen-wird-gmail-jetzt-abgeschaltet/

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Translation http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.googlewatchblog.de%2F2007%2F11%2F10%2Fvorratsdatenspeicherung-beschlossen-wird-gmail-jetzt-abgeschaltet%2F&langpair=de|en&hl=en&ie=UTF8

Avrohom Eliezer Friedman (AEF) [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

James –

Thanks for the link. But is there any way I could get it translated into English? (He he!!)

Sohil [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

^ Just wait for Philipp :)

Above 4 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

AL7AIR [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Wolfgang Schäuble = Stasi 2.0 ;P

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

In the United Kingdom, this information is already collected. It's supposedly a "voluntary" agreement, but the Act provides that the Secretary of State may make it compulsory if it isn't being "voluntarily" made available.

Information collected is: subscriber name, date of birth, installation and billing address, payment methods, credit card details, contact information, list of services subscribed to, email addresses, IP at registration, instant messaging handle, login dates, MAC address, IP tunnel address, ADSL endpoints, phone numbers called, call diversion, date and time of start and end of each phone call, location data at start and/or end of call, mobile data exchanged with foreign operators, SMS calling and called number, date and time of sending, delivery receipt, location data when messages sent and received, email logon (authentication user name, date and time, IP address), sent emails (authentication user name, date and time, from/to/cc email addresses), received emails (authentication user name, date and time, from/to email addresses), proxy server logs (including IP address, date/time, URLs visited, services), web browsing (IP address, domain name visited, time/date), postal mail (scan of information on the outside of a postal item, records of parcel consignment/delivery/collection), etc, etc.

None of this was enough to make Google stop offering Google Mail in the United Kingdom, so I can't imagine Google will be abandoning Germany either.

The retained data can be accessed by the police, customs, tax, and security services.

More details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention

/pd [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

From a souce in .de...

"According to [1], Internet Service Providers must record the
following information:
1) the IP address assigned to the customer
2) a precise identification of the (dial-in) port that is used for
internet access (i.e. your phone number, customer number etc)
3) connect and disconnect timestamps

This does however not include logging IP connection attemps to your
favorite blog or website or anything like this.
They only have to log the IP address and connection times of your
dial-in session.

Besides that, there is an explicit statement [2] that forbids
recording contents or data related to the visited web pages."

Having read this, I don't think its a bad idea at all.. after all they are just logging who is on the network .. and not what you are doing!!

Andy Wong [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Fine, such law or bill. However, any query to the log by the police should get a court order first. The police should not be allowed to query the log at will, as the police forces in most western countries are not allowed to search a private house hold without a court warrant. The digital log is essentially a private house hold of the service provider.

Tadeusz Szewczyk [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Also your current position is tracked for mobile phones and secret services do not need any court order, they can do it preventively. The so called online raid will be secret and has already been practiced by the authorities although the courts have repeteadly denounce it as illegal.

Schäuble also wants to shoot down passenger air planes (in case of a terrorist attack, but you will never know once a plane is destroyed), reintroduce torture as an interrogation method and set up Guantanamo-like prisons for "endangerers" who should be imprisoned before committing a crime among other measures to be taken.

All in all: This guy is a raging mad man who must be stopped, but he is just the tip of the ice berg. Democracy is at stake right in Germany.

pjh [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Wasn't the quote about shutting down Gmail in Germany relating to a completely separate provision requiring personally identifiable info (e.g. home address) to be stored for each email account? That would be unenforceable, as it would be necessary to manually confirm details with each person with an account.

See http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-06-23-n52.html

It seems to me that THIS law simply requires some logs to be kept which (if examined carefully) *may* also reveal personal details (note that Google probably already keeps logs like this anyway though) – and although this may have privacy implications, surely this is a separate issue from the one mentioned in the 'shutting down' discussion?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Pjh, I'm not completely sure. I found the original statement by Google on Heise.de, which was quoting Wirschaftswoche, and Heise.de in their article with Peter Fleischer's comments (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/91627) referenced this article as point of debate (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/88449), an article which is about this "Vorratsdatenspeicherung". However, I was not able to retrieve the Wirschaftswoche article anymore unfortunately while preparing this article, they took it down or behind some reg-wall by now.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Pjh, this is strange. Heise's first article linked above references an older Heise article which already states that enforcing personal identification during registration will not be part of the "Vorratsdatenspeicherungs" law anymore. It may be that Heise confused some issues (they are the biggest IT news site in Germany)? This seems to indicate though that you're right and Peter might have referenced another part of the law. I would need to see the original article at Wirtschaftswoche now.

I added an update to the post.

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