Legal Research

Sitefinder case remitted back to Information Tribunal

By scott

The Court of Appeal has remitted back to the Information Tribunal an appeal by Ofcom against a decision of the Information Commissioner that Ofcom must supply the full Sitefinder dataset - including the names of operators, locations and power levels of all mobile base stations - to parties who request it.The Mobile operators (MNOs) - in particular, T-Mobile - argued that disclosure breached their database rights, and would leave the mobile operators? base stations open to vandalism and possible terrorist attack.

The Court of Appeal found the Tribunal had erred in not weighing the aggregate public interest in maintaining the two applicable exceptions against the public interest in disclosure in section 12(5) of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. However, it agreed with that the Tribunal was open to find that the public interest in disclosure of the environmental information had extended to disclosure of the names of the MNOs, and that it was correct to consider the benefit from use of the information in epidemiological research even if that use would be in breach of the database rights of the MNOs. The Court also stated that - even though it was remitting the case, it believed that the Tribunal was ‘very likely’ to reach the same conclusion, even when it had weighed the aggregate public interest.

O2, 3, Orange, Vodafone, Airwave and Network Rail have been voluntarily supplying information of mobile base station data to Ofcom for the Sitefinder database at approximately three month intervals. T-Mobile has continually refused to do so since 2005.

I have previously covered this case here

Full post as published by Information Overload on February 23, 2009 (boomark / email).