The Federal Court of Justice in Germany was scheduled to rule on this particular Tuesday, but rather made a decision to refer the issue to the European Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

The response to the inquiry is a must for on-going conversations about the EU data protection reform too as for the numerous sites that save and track users’ IP addresses, the Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBV) said.

Also, in case the CJEU rules that IP addresses are private data, this might have enormous impacts for the simplicity of use of the web in Europe. Under German law, private data may just be saved with a user’s authorization or for the purposes of such and charge. If IP addresses are considered private info though, among the potential outcome may be that Internet users would need to give their permission to save their address whenever they see a web site, or instead, that sites would need to begin saving them on a distinct legal foundation, the VZBV said.

When Internet users see with German government websites, their IP addresses are saved in addition to the time when they visited a specific page.

Breyer nevertheless claimed that sites may also be safe without monitoring every user across every page. “We want safe IT systems, not a general feeling against Germany’s 50 million Internet users,” he said.

Breyer needs the government to refrain from saving his IP address more in relation to the time he’s active on the web site. Since the address may be linked to Breyer, this really is data that is private, and he didn’t give his approval to be monitored. “If my criticism is successful, all other Internet users will likely be protected from recording of their browsing behaviour,” he said.

One of the issues in ascertaining whether IP addresses are really private data is that Internet users do not consistently use the same, static IP address. ISPs instead assign dynamic IP addresses to users from a pool.

And when it’s altered, trackers might understand that by simply combining other data together with the IP address. This type of information is unable to be considered anonymous, the researchers found.

The last legal word on the issue will come from that procedure which could take, and the CJEU.