After all that has been said and done over the past months regarding metadata security in Australia, it seems the vast majority of Australian internet service providers (ISPs) are not ready to start collecting and storing metadata as required under the country’s data retention laws which come into effect this month. This interesting news came to us from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in their article, “Majority of ISPs not ready for metadata laws that come into force today.”

ISPs have had the past six months to plan how they will comply with the law, but 84 per cent say they are not ready and will not be collecting metadata on time. Fortunately, the Attorney-General’s department says ISPs have until April 2017 to become fully compliant with the law.

It is important to remember that though ISPs and and mobile phone networks will now be required to store customers’ metadata (the sender, recipient, and time of emails and calls), it doesn’t include the content of an email or telephone call.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.