First off, thank’s to Karlin Lillington for the link to my article off her blog

Karlin states in response to my article that there is “perhaps some confusion between holding traffic data and holding content”. I have to say, what I gathered from the SAGE meeting was that perhaps we may be forced to store the content as well. I agree this may be worst case scenario, but it’s by no means certian as of yet what we will be asked to retain. It would be really useful if the Department of Justice had some information on their website about this bill, they assured us last night that it should be up on their website next week at some stage.

The best information I have to hand tonight comes courtesy of The Data Protection Officer. Their site states:

“In relation to the Internet, traffic data would encompass the e-mail addresses on all correspondence to and from the subscriber, a record of date, time, and size of message as well as other transmission details but hopefully excluding message subject and content. It would also encompass a record of every login session, every web page visited and read, every search term entered, every file downloaded, every purchase made, and so forth – in short, virtually the entirety of one’s online “session” but hopefully excluding the content of e-mail messages.”

The last line there is the crucial one, in relation to content. As this bill is still in the consultation stages, we can’t really comment properly on what will be the case, simply what may or may not be, but even just the retention of Traffic Data would be a nightmare for all the reasons I outlined in my previous article.