According to Heise Newsticker, T-Online must not store the dynamic IP-Addresses of its dialin users, since this information is not needed for billing. A general storage of this information for “debugging” purposes or abuse cases is also not allowed.

This is a good day for data privacy in germany, after all the recent pushes by our minister of the interior to spy on us. (And a bad day for the music industry, since this means it will be harder to find out the names of all those napster users).

Interestingly, this case derived not from a file sharing process: an ironic posting in the heise forums resulted in the case, the author of the posting won - and immedeately filed against T-Online for having had his name assigned to the IP-Address. THANK YOU, Holger Voss, for fighting for our privacy!

Note that the policy will probably still be able to find out who you are while you are still online. Given T-online’s 24h-hangup practice this means up to 24h hours.