Internet service provider tells Senate hearing that harvesting of metadata to help security agencies will cost households dear

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Internet service provider iinet has warned of significant costs and privacy concerns with a mandatory data retention regime that is currently being considered by the federal government.



Speaking at a Senate hearing into telecoms law reform in Canberra on Tuesday, the company’s chief regulatory officer Steve Dalby warned that consumers could face a hike in charges of more than $100 a year per person.



The projection was based on a particular model that Dalby said was the company’s interpretation of a confidential briefing from the attorney general’s department.



A mandatory data retention scheme involves storing information from internet and phone users. Such a scheme would include “metadata” of users, which can reveal a person’s associations through their call and internet data, locations where they used services and other information that could be considered “non-content” information.



“This would be an ongoing increase. We are talking about….$100m in the first two years, growing over time as that data grows,” Dalby said.



Dalby added that law enforcement and government agencies in Australia had offered “contradictory and confusing comments” surrounding the nature of metadata that had significantly downplayed the invasiveness of what was being proposed.



“Metadata underlies all communications and it is fundamentally misleading to downplay the degree of intrusion of data retention regimes,” he said.



“A false assertion is that such regimes do not include the actual content of what our customers might be communicating. These inaccurate descriptions are dangerous and inappropriate.”



Dalby went on to show the committee, which is examining the overhaul of the 1979 Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act, the breadth of personal information that could be accessed from metadata within a Tweet. He also demonstrated how content information could be captured.



“In the case of Twitter this may include who wrote the tweet, their biography, their location, when it was written, how many other tweets have been on that users account, what time it was, who it was sent to, where the author is normally based and, surprisingly in the case of Twitter, the 140 characters of the content in the tweet as well,” he said.

The metadata contained in a Tweet.. Photograph: /Guardian

Dalby said the additional costs that could be faced may be a conservative estimate if the government instead opted for a purely non-content regime. This was because metadata like the Tweet outlined by Dalby would then need to strip out content manually by the providers.

“That is petabytes of data a day for our own organisations. You would need supercomputers to extract that data,” he said. “It’s costs upon costs.”



He said the attorney-general’s department in their submission to the inquiry had “overstated” the current collection practices of telecommunications providers, adding it would be an enormous effort to establish a mandatory retention scheme compared to the current practices of companies.



“This suggestion of routine collection from the attorney general’s department could be likened to saying ‘you’re going to the shops to get a litre of milk anyway so it’s no big deal to bring the whole supermarket’”



In an earlier hearing last week the director general of ASIO David Irvine played down the invasiveness of metadata and said what was being proposed was not a Big Brother arrangement.



The federal government has not introduced legislation for a mandatory data regime, but has indicated it is actively considering putting forward a scheme.



The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association and Dalby both said they had not had any formal consultations with the government about a mandatory data program.

