EU Official: IP Is Personal

Fri Jan 25 06:33:20 UTC 2008

On Jan 24, 2008, at 8:55 PM, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:39:53 PST, fred at cisco.com said:
>
>> What we can do with IP addresses is conclude that the user of the
>> machine with an address is likely to be one of its usual users. We
>> can't say that with 100% certainty, because there are any number of
>> ways people can get "unusual" access. But even so, if one can show a
>> pattern of usage, the usual suspects can probably figure out which of
>> them, or what other "unusual" user, might have done this or that.
>
> And oddly enough, license plates on cars act *exactly the same way*  
> - but
> nobody seems at all surprised when police can work backwards from a  
> plate
> and come up with a suspect (who, admittedly, may not have been  
> involved if
> the car was borrowed/stolen/etc).
>
In order to be using the license plate, you had to be physically  
present in the car.

> You can work backwards from a phone number to a person, without a  
> *guarantee*
> that you have the right person - but I don't see anybody claiming that
> phone numbers don't qualify as "personal information" under the EU  
> definition.
>
In order to be on the telephone number, you (almost always) need to be  
present
at the site where that phone number is terminated.

I don't know about your IP addresses, but, people can use my IP  
addresses
from a number of locations which are nowhere near the jurisdiction in  
which
my network operates, so, I don't really see the correlation here with  
license
plates or phone numbers.

Owen