6 October
What happened on this date in privacy, anonymity networks and censorship. Every year on the same date we add a new look back and keep the earlier ones as they were.
2026
How long your phone records are kept
Every call you make leaves a record of both numbers, the date and the start and end times. In Taiwan, the regulations on agencies' queries of telecom records (電信事業處理有關機關查詢電信通信紀錄實施辦法) set the retention period for mobile call records at six months. On 6 October 2020, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that member states generally cannot require telecom providers to retain or hand over everyone's traffic and location data across the board, whether to fight crime in general or to safeguard national security. A member state facing a genuine and present or foreseeable serious threat to national security can still require such retention, but only for a period limited to what is strictly necessary, which may be extended while the threat persists. Call records are kept by carriers under the law, and there is no setting on your side that turns them off.
Also on this day
- Japan issued an imperial ordinance abolishing the Newspaper Business Order and other wartime orders, lifting the controls they placed on newspapers and publishing and the limits on what newspapers could print. Source: National Archives of Japan
- After a coup, Thailand's National Administrative Reform Council ordered daily newspapers to stop printing until further notice, required weeklies and other publications to be vetted by a news inspection committee before printing, and limited radio stations to relaying the state broadcaster. Source: Royal Thai Government Gazette
- The EU Court of Justice declared invalid the European Commission's 2000 decision that the US Safe Harbour principles gave adequate protection to personal data. Source: EUR-Lex