The Polish digital rights group Panoptykon Foundation recently published harrowing findings regarding abuses of Poland’s mandatory data retention law. Using a Freedom of Information Act request, Panoptykon obtained documents that reveal that in 2011, Polish authorities requested users’ traffic data retained by telcos and ISPs over 1.85 million times — half a million times more than in 2010. These findings underscore fundamental flaws in the Polish mandatory data retention law that was fast-tracked in legislation without public debate in 2009.

This paper is aims to give a brief overview of the following issues: (i) Polish data retention regime and its drawbacks; (ii) the use of data retention in practice and available
data on the subject; (iii) campaign run by the Panoptykon Foundation over last two years; and (iv) political shifts that occurred in Poland.