# Data retention law passes in the Australian senate. Service providers will be required to store your



## MannDude (Mar 26, 2015)

In short: Phone and internet service providers (and I assume hosting companies) operating in Australia will need to maintain metadata records of customer activity for a 2 year period in order to assist with law enforcement upon request.

Information required to be recorded include:


Names, addresses, birthdates, financial information
Phone data such as numbers called and messaged
Computer and internet IP addresses



> Metadata – which includes call records, visited web site addresses, location information, billing data and other related data (but not content) – will be stored for two years in a location decided by the individual service provider.


Companies now have 18 months to prepare and deploy solutions to accommodate this, which of course will come at a large cost for most. The data is not required to be stored within Australia and can be stored overseas in places with stronger privacy laws and how and where the data is stored is a choice left to the impacted companies.

I do not see how this would not impact web-hosting companies based out of Australia and would expect that they would be required to comply as well.

You can read more here: http://techgeek.com.au/2015/03/26/data-retention-in-australia-passes-the-senate/


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## willie (Mar 26, 2015)

This is a bummer.  I've been using fastmail.com for email since they are one of the most privacy conscious email providers.  Their servers are in the US and elsewhere, but the company is based in Australia.  I wonder if they are affected.


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## trewq (Mar 26, 2015)

willie said:


> This is a bummer. I've been using fastmail.com for email since they are one of the most privacy conscious email providers. Their servers are in the US and elsewhere, but the company is based in Australia. I wonder if they are affected.


Web mail, Web hosting and VPS hosting are not covered by these laws as far as I can tell and from what I have read.


To buy these services you are not normally in business with a carrier provider, the host is.


@Oliver might be able to enlighten us about the requirements of VPS providers in Australia. That is if he is even aware yet, the law is pretty vague and their is a lot of confusion with that's actually covered and who can request the data.


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