Data retention - a new digital kind of divide

We Australians are generally a sceptical bunch, but nothing gets our backs up more than when we feel our individual privacy may be being compromised, especially when the government sticks its nose in.

The discussion paper published by the Attorney-General’s department in July this year recommending sweeping changes to up to six acts of Parliament and imposing a two-year retention of data on service providers has caused a big stink amongst the general public, let alone civil libertarians and certain political figures. A recent Fairfax survey showed an overwhelming 96% of readers disagreed with telcos storing telephone and internet data.

The latest stoush over the proposed policy is whether the actual content of communications and data (which includes emails, SMS, tweets, browser sessions) will need to be retained or just information about the transmission such as source, destination, date, time, duration, type and the equipment used. To help it navigate through the controversial issue, the government is looking to the Data Retention Directive introduced by the EU back in 2006, where 25 member states have implemented it as national policy. Last year, after reviewing its implementation in a number of states, the European Commission found that the current laws have the potential to impose “significant limitations on the right to privacy”. It went further by recommending an overhaul of the directive to strengthen safeguards to stop citizens’ data being used inappropriately, by imposing stricter controls on the storage, access to and use of data.

As the debate is sure to intensify in parliament and the public arena, those that will need to comply with the policy, the telecommunications and service providers, are already counting the commercial cost.

David Epstein, the head of regulatory affairs at Australia’s second largest telco, Optus, has already fired a warning shot estimating that the cost of implementing technology to capture and store this information could be between $500 and $700 million. CEO of Telstra David Thodey said his concern is not about how much it will cost Australia’s largest telco to keep the data but who will have access to it.

These viewpoints from both Optus and Telstra are important as much as they are valid. If the recommendations of the paper are enacted into law, how do service providers minimise the inevitable passing of costs to consumers for storing and retrieving this information?

Thankfully, information technology, particularly data storage, has come a long way over the past five years. Recognising the explosive growth in both data generation and retention, storage vendors have done more than deliver greater capacities at lower costs.  Most have introduced capacity efficiency technologies to their products to reduce the physical storage required by removing duplicate data and compressing it.  Working together with this, data archiving standards have greatly matured over this time by not only automating the job of filing digital information from applications in a secure way but being able to retrieve it with the help of intelligent search technologies that are specifically built for industry compliance and regulation.

Although we expect to see far more discussion, consultation, debate and parliamentary enquiries ahead before anything is enacted into legislation, at least the Australian Government recognises the need to have a strategy to tackle the ever-increasing threats coming from the digital world and to protect citizens from criminals and terrorists that want to do us harm.

*Adrian De Luca is a Board Director, SNIA ANZ. He is also CTO and Director, Pre-Sales, at the Australian & New Zealand branch of Hitachi Data Systems. De Luca is an advisor on the National Standing Committee for Cloud Computing (NSCCC) for the Australian Government. He co-authored ‘Storage Virtualization for Dummies’.