Maxim Ali has commented to The Bell on a bill to give law enforcement agencies data on smartphone locations without a court order
The Ministry of Communications is preparing amendments to the Law on Communications, which will take the geolocation of users out of the communications secrecy. Thus, mobile operators will be able to provide this information to the investigative authorities without a court decision. According to the authors of the bill, the changes will allow to get information more quickly when searching for missing people.
Maxim Ali, partner and head of IP/IT practice at Maxima Legal, said that legal logic of the draft law is not perfect. The expert explained to The Bell that the authors of the initiative refer to the position of the Constitutional Court, according to which any information transmitted by telephone equipment is protected by secret communication. However, according to them, geolocation data cannot be considered confidential because it is collected on the operators’ equipment.
But this approach is highly controversial, explained Maxim Ali: the data does not appear out of nowhere, it is collected through the phone. Moreover, the essence of the Constitutional Court’s position was that any information about a user is protected by the secrecy of communications. And the fact that it is collected on the operator’s devices and not in the user’s phone should not change the approach to the interpretation of the Constitution.
However, even now, the real situation with the protection of users’ location data leaves much to be desired, Maxim noted. A court grants investigators’ requests for data in the vast majority of cases – that is, there is no serious filter protecting the privacy of citizens in their dealings with the authorities. “The amendments do not so much open up access to data as simplify it. It can be expected that unscrupulous agency officials will be able to use the new mechanism to trade data or pressure businesses,” summarised Maxim Ali. The problem is that in practice there is no way for the telecom operator to verify the validity of the authorities’ requests, which means that the adoption of amendments will force them to simply obey any request.