ISPs and police at odds over child abuse data costs

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 22 Jan 2009 at 16:36

The Internet Service Providers Association has defended the policy of charging the police for information related to child abuse investigations as "fair and necessary".

Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), has called for ISPs to abandon charges in cases where the crime involves children.

According to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, CEOP has made 9400 requests to ISPs since 2006 at a total cost of £171,505.

According to Gamble, around £100,000 of this went towards investigating crimes involving children, which he described as "ridiculous".

"By the end of this financial year we'll have paid more than £100,000 to ISPs to identify locate and hold to account those criminals who go online and threaten children and make the online environment less safe than it should be," he says.

"That could have put a number of specialists to work here - doing the right thing, making the environment safer, making it even more commercially viable. We all have a mutual interest here."

However, ISPA the trade body which represents the UK's ISPs claims the situation is not quite so clear cut as Gamble would have people believe.

"During the drafting of the RIPA legislation, it was agreed that cost recovery was necessary to cover the costs of the request and to deter the application of unnecessary requests," says a statement from the body. "ISPs do not make money from these requests, they are simply a charge for the cost of retrieval."