German ISP Forced To Delete IP Logs

Via Slashdot: A German federal court has ruled that T-Online, a major ISP in Germany, must now delete IP logs at the customer's request. The ruling is in the interest of privacy, and was the result of a court case brought by a man who had been fined for making a sarcastic comment on an internet forum in 2002. In this case, T-Online had retained his dynamic IP address for longer than permitted by law and had turned it over to law enforcement agencies without a court order.

I am of mixed opinion on this. One the one hand, the ability to to make anonymous political comments is an absolute necessity in this day of government retribution — as this case clearly shows. But on the other hand, this will make it even harder to track down spammers, and T-Online already has enough of a spam problem.

Interestingly enough, this ruling may be in conflict with the EU data retention law which requires that records be retained for law enforcement purposes for between six and 24 months.