The UK government is now accused of breaking the law, because it keeps demanding that telecoms and ISPs retain records of phone calls, texts and broadband usage, though the Europe’s highest court said that this breaches the fundamental right to privacy. Now the British government could face a high court challenge and be demanded to strike down the law, which was enacted 5 years ago by the previous Labour administration.

So, the Data Retention (EC Direction) Act was implemented by the previous Labour government 5 years ago in response to the EU data retention directive. The latter required member states to store people’s telecoms data for at least 6 months (but no longer than 2 years). The UK’s law requires providers to keep information for 18 months.

However, a few months ago, the EU Court of Justice ruled the directive invalid, as it constituted a serious interference with the right to privacy and protection of personal data. However, the UK paid no attention to the court ruling and made no move to invalidate the Act. Instead, the government had explicitly demanded telecoms that they continue to observe their obligations as outlined in any notice.

According to Home Office, the department was looking at the problem as a matter of urgency and deciding what it should do to ensure public authorities can continue to access communications data. Nevertheless, they have advised providers that the UK Data Retention Act remain in force, arguing that the retention of communications data is required to help law enforcement “investigate crime, protect the public and ensure national security”.

The other side claims that the retention of communications data allows to create a both faithful and exhaustive map of a large portion of an individual’s conduct strictly forming their private life and private identity. In addition, they underlined the risk that the retained information might be used illegally, which can be deemed fraudulent or even malicious.

The problem is that information retained under the UK directive isn’t held by public authorities. Instead, it is kept by the providers, and there are no requirements to physically store it in the European Union – it can be kept on servers anywhere in the globe.

The Open Rights Group believes that there is no legal basis for the UK authorities’ demands to continue retention of data. The common sense says that when the EU Court of Justice struck down the data retention directive, this automatically rendered the UK’s implementation of the directive illegal.

While the UK government says it takes the judgment into consideration, the privacy outfits complain that the “consideration” takes too long for the authorities. In fact, they have had more than 2 months to draw a conclusion, and the grounds on which they demand ISPs to continue to retain data have no basis anymore.

Now the UK government is requested to provide a full explanation of why it believes the telecoms and ISPs should continue retaining their customers’ data against the law.