Ireland

This week, the European Union’s top court once again found that blanket data retention mandates are hostile to privacy and democratic freedoms, and incompatible with EU law. Such mandates require service providers to store data on all of the provider’s users for a set period.  The decision responds to challenges to sweeping data retention laws in the UK and Sweden to invalidate the laws after the court previously struck down an EU-wide data retention law in 2014.