‘A complete shambles’: Metadata laws come into effect, but many telcos aren’t prepared

IT’S been called a “shambles”, but from today, if you email a rival employer or call a medical centre about an embarrassing problem, your secret could be out.

Please be aware: From today, if you call a medical centre specialising in a particularly embarrassing disease or send a sneaky email to a company other than the one you work for, your secret is out.

Information on your confidential communications — the metadata covering who sent it, who received it and when — will be there for inspection by officials for at least two years under new metadata retention laws that come into effect today.

The law says whoever gets to see your metadata must not see the actual message you emailed or hear the conversation you had on the telephone.

But in many cases it won’t be hard to guess. And if your secret does get out, you might be headed for public embarrassment.

Digital freedom not-for-profit group Electronic Frontiers Foundation has warned messages don’t always need to be read for strangers to know what you are up to.

For example, if you are recorded telephoning a clinic specialising in sexually transmitted diseases, it’s a fair assumption the discussion was not about the weather.

Or if you sent an email to a rival employer, it is unlikely to have been for a chat about weekend sport.

To use an example provided by Electronic Frontiers: “They know you rang a phone sex service at 2.24am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don’t know what you talked about.”

No, but maybe they would be prepared to make a not-so-wild guess.

In some good news, it appears many telecommunications companies charged with collecting and storing customers’ data aren’t fully prepared for the task.

The Government is giving these companies $131 million in taxpayer cash to establish the scheme but Communications Alliance chief John Stanton has told Fairfax Media many providers are still waiting to hear from the government about whether their implementation plans have been approved and when these subsidies will be distributed.

And there are a host of new apps designed to help you circumvent the laws.

Jon Lawrence, executive officer from Electronic Frontiers Australia, told the Adelaide Advertiser said the implementation, which will take another 18 months, had been a “complete shambles”.

“Nobody in the industry really understands what is being asked of them,” he said.

He said any email or smartphone messaging service provided by an overseas company would allow Australians to circumvent the laws.

From today — and until a review might demand the law be changed — telephone and internet service providers will be retaining the details of your messages for two years, to help fight crime and terrorism.

What is about to be archived is not fully described in the relevant legislation, which refers to what will not be stored: “Information that is the contents or substance of a communication”, or “a document to the extent that the document contains the contents or substance of a communication”.

Most Australians will accept this because they want to help the fight against deadly undercover conspiracies. And they do not believe they are giving too much away by surrendering their metadata — the so-called sender and addressee on an envelope but not the letter inside.

When it comes to emails, the archived material will cover the date and time sent and to whom. The time of internet connections will be stored; as will how much you upload and download.

For telephone calls the information will include numbers called, even if there is no answer and even 1800 numbers; duration of calls; text message destinations, times and dates and where you were when you sent them.

The Government legislation, backed by the Labor Opposition, has safeguards including recourse to an ombudsman at times of dispute, and laws to prevent the metadata being sold to 4th parties.

The argument is that metadata surveillance is being updated to meet then digital age and embedded in a defined structure rather than past ad hoc systems.

Coincidently or not, this happens to be Stay Smart Online Week. Communications Minister Mitch Fifield has said the objective was to “highlight the importance for businesses and individuals to protect their personal and their financial information”.

Originally published as ‘A complete shambles’: Metadata laws come into effect, but many telcos aren’t prepared