On ICT law, politics and other digital stuff
Yet more evidence that Data Protection is not an absolute right. On the contrary, as the Italian Supreme Court decision n. 7783/14 said 1 a few days ago:
the interest to the protection of personal data must step back when confronted by true defense needs and other legally relevant interests, such as the fair and coherent enforcement of the right of defense in court.
The Italian Data Protection Authority public hearing about the upcoming credit-scoring database regulation is ending soon and will likely endanger the possibility for a company to protect its right of not being defrauded by unfaithful clients.
This is because the DPA keeps pushing the (wrong) notion that data-protection=privacy=absolute right. This is a logical and legal fallacy because the ? concerned EU directives include privacy among the other fundamental rights to be protected while processing personal data.
This means that data-protection as such has not a higher status than the right of defense or the right to freedom of entrepreneurship (both granted by the Italian Constitution). But the upcoming regulation will likely to ignore this (elementary) fact.
There is a common opinion that personal data should be deleted almost immediately and, anyway, as soon as they become useless: a sensitive problem in particular under the (now defunct) Data Retention Directive, once the mandatory retention period expired.
This position is not correct since a company has a legitimate motive – and a legal obligation – to preserve whatever information, including personal data, that are necessary to abide the law and to protect both its right of defense and the right to a due process. This means that under the term set forth by the Statute of limitation a company might, at its own will, choose to continue retaining personal data of its customer base.
In Italy, the ordinary Statute of limitation is ten years. So companies can be sued by customers and tax authorities for alleged charges that go way back into the past. This is what happened in a court case tried in front of the Justice of peace of Grosseto (Tuscany) that on January 2014 ruled a quarrel started in 2011 between a telecom company and a client. The ruling said that, under the rule of evidence for civil trials, the telecom company has the duty to provide evidence of having actually delivered its services and that this duty is fulfilled by showing the traffic-data log.
It is clear that by interpreting the Italian Data Protection Act in a way that forces the deletion of the traffic data after a few months, an ISP or a telecom operator wouldn’t be able to defend itself if the trial starts within the Statute of limitation term but after the traffic data have been deleted.
A similar situation might happens in the antitrust field and in case of investigations run by the Italian Internal Revenue Service, so the conclusion is that the Data Protection Legal Framework cannot be interpreted in such a strict manner to endanger the legitimate rights of a company.
From the Law Enforcement perspective, the ECJ ruling that on Apr. 8, 2014 declared invalid the Data Retention Directive didn’t harm its investigation to such a greater extent as somebody has claimed. There are, indeed, other legal tools that can be used to fit the purpose of getting traffic data of interest.
First, ISPs and telco operators might still retain traffic data for other legitimate purposes and for longer periods than the six months “sponsored” by the ECJ. This can happens either with the consent of the customer (for marketing and commercial purposes) or without (in case the traffic data have to be retained to meet under a statutory term (in Italy, ten years) the legal obligation to provide evidence to the tax authorities that the billed services have actually been provided and that the ISP is not involved in a money laundering activity. Thus as soon as some data – though not all the one retained under the now defunct DRD – are available, a prosecutor can always seize it.
Second, the Budapest Convention on cybercrime allows the public authorities to issue a “data-freeze” order to avoid the deletion. Again, this might be a second best solution, but it is currently working and viable.
Third, the national Data Protection Authorities have the power, under the Directive 95/46, to issue orders to “customize” the implementation of this legal instrument so to match the requirements of the ECJ, thus legally keeping alive, though maybe partially, the intrinsic admissibility of the data-retention as such under the current European Data Protection legal framework.
Today the Europan Court of Justice has declared invalid the Data Retention Directive that forced ISP’s to retain some traffic data to be made available for the law enforcement agencies. Though the decision is immediately effective, until the local parliaments don’t update the concerned internal regulations, as crazy as it may sounds, ? the data-retention is still a legal obligation to be fulfilled.
It would be of great help if the local data protection authorities would issue a statement saying that they will not enforce anymore their own controls on data-retention, since any activity in this direction could be challenged on the ECJ decision.
A final remark: how is it possible that the data-protection authorities all over Europe didn’t spot the “little”, “tiny” problem of the Data Retention Directive?