ISPs and telcos to monitor customers forever?

The EU has removed time limits on how long ISPs and telcos will be obliged to keep information on their customers for.

The European Union, which is in the process of creating new electronic data retention legislation, previously stipulated that data on users' phone calls and emails could only be held for 36 months in order to investigate and solve crime.

The revised text says that individual governments can now set their own limit on the data storage. The minimum time data must be stored remains unchanged at 12 months, or 12 months from the end of a subscriber's contract with their provider.

That could mean that governments will demand ISPs and telcos keep the data for decades. In the recent wrangling between the EU and the US over the retention of data on transatlantic air travellers, the US government initially demanded that the passengers' details must be stored for 50 years.

The data that the EU will oblige telcos or ISPs to keep will include the time and date of a phone call, the duration of the call and who it was to as well as email logs and customers' billing details. No content of emails or phone calls will be recorded.

The legislation covers SMS, MMS, VoIP, transfer protocols, email and mobile calls.

The EU's draft regulations state that the legislation is necessary to "trace the source of illegal content such as child pornography and racist and xenophobic material; the source of attacks against information systems; and to identify those involved in using electronic communications networks for the purpose of organised crime and terrorism".

The law is likely to come into effect in June 2007, although the UK has already passed similar legislation - the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act.

The RIP Act came into force in November 2003 and now obliges ISPs and telcos to record data on their customers.