Court case 6 C 13.18 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2019)

Since 2016, SpaceNet AG, an ISP, has been challenging a German law which provides for an obligation to store traffic and location data of all users without any reason and across the board, arguing it is incompatible with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Question referred "In the light of [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12012P/TXT Articles 7, 8 and 11 and Article 52(1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union], on the one hand, and of Article 6 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and Article 4 of the Treaty on European Union, on the other hand, is [https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32002L0058&from=EN Article 15 of Directive 2002/58/EC] to be interpreted as precluding national legislation which obliges providers of publicly available electronic communications services to retain traffic and location data of end users of those services where * that obligation does not require a specific reason in terms of location, time or region, * the following data are the subject of the storage obligation in the provision of publicly available telephone services — including the transmission of short messages, multimedia messages or similar messages and unanswered or unsuccessful calls: * the telephone number or other identifier of the calling and called parties as well as, in the case of call switching or forwarding, of every other line involved, * the date and time of the start and end of the call or — in the case of the transmission of a short message, multimedia message or similar message — the times of dispatch and receipt of the message, and an indication of the relevant time zone, * information regarding the service used, if different services can be used in the context of the telephone service, * and also, in the case of mobile telephone services the International Mobile Subscriber Identity of the calling and called parties, the international identifier of the calling and c