On October 28, 2014, the Bundesgerichtshof (the German Federal Supreme Court) referred to the European Court of Justice a preliminary ruling on whether an IP address constitutes personal data under the EU Data Protection Directive (court ref. VI ZR 135/13). The Bundesgerichtshof, having to decide whether the IP address of a visitor can be saved beyond the termination of the respective user activity, decided to stay the proceedings and refer two issues to the ECJ.
If IP addressed stored by service providers in connection with visits to their websites will be deemed personal data, they will enjoy the protection of EU privacy laws.
More information are available here, here, and here
The document submitted by the German Federal Supreme Court (in German) is available at http://juris.bundesgerichtshof…
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