In December, the European Parliament passed sweeping data retention rules aimed at the telecommunications and Internet industries, requiring that fixed-line and cellphone records, e-mail and Internet logs be stored for up to two years.
Since that vote last year, the government has said it wants to extract the UK from the jurisdiction of the CJEU — raising questions of whether it might seek to avoid compliance with the EU-level data retention rules once it's no longer a Member State.
Companies have been packing ever more machines into data centres, both to increase their computing capacity and to comply with new data-retention rules.
Zapproved, a Portland, Ore.-based legal software startup that helps businesses comply with data-retention rules and during the eDiscovery process when they face litigation, today disclosed that it has raised a $15 million funding round led by K1 Investment Management.
Last year the European court of justice struck down an EU law on data retention and ruled that "blanket" storage of EU citizens' data violated their human rights.
Millie Graham Wood, from Privacy International, said: "[We believe] that existing EU law rules out data retention regimes of the kind contained in Dripa and reflected in the investigatory powers bill.
For six months, he said, there was a "Ping Pong game" of lawyers' letters back and forth until, separately, the Constitutional Court there decided that the existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal.
Facebook, which has been investigated by European regulators for its data retention practices, warned last year against rules that might not keep up with the pace of change on the Internet.
It also grants, what one former lawyer described to TechCrunch as "draconian and swingeing powers" to the UK Home Secretary to set rules for data retention.
Camilla Graham Wood, legal officer at Privacy International, said: "The UK, in enacting legislation that is almost identical to the European data retention directive which the [ECJ] ruled unlawful, is mandating data retention on a widespread, indiscriminate and untargeted basis.
There has to be … proportionate rules on the data retention.
