The Appeals Court yesterday decided in favour of the protection of people’s data when, in a landmark judgment, it ruled that mobile service providers should not be expected to hand over people’s data to the police as part of their investigations.

In his judgement, the Appeal’s Court, presided over by Mr Justice Philip Sciberras, declared that the police had other options which they could use to investigate crimes rather than ask mobile service providers to provide private information about people and location data.

By way of this judgement, the court revoked the decision handed down by the Data Protection Tribunal which had concluded that Go Mobile and Vodafone were to give information requested by the police while maintaining the “right to privacy of the data subjects and the rights and obligations of the police authorities to sustain the interest of national security and the prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of criminal or administrative offences”.

Both service providers appealed this decision handed down by the tribunal but the Appeals Board turned down this appeal.

They later filed an appeal before the court and a decision revoking the original decision was handed down yesterday.

The issue was raised after the police requested the Data Protection Commissioner to give his consent for the service providers to pass on data to help the police in their investigations into a series of arsons taking place in various parts of Malta.

In his judgement, Mr Justice Philip Sciberras said it could not tolerate that all the mobile users are considered as suspects just so that the police can process their information in an elimination process. This is not a police state, he said.

Mr Justice Sciberras said that when one considers the general and individual interests, and the fact that this is not the only option the police had, it is not permissible that there is direct access to this data.

He therefore upheld the appeal and turned down both the original judgement as well as that judgement turning down the appeal filed before the Data Protection Appeals Board.