Court Deems Judicial Authorization is Unnecessary to Require Information on IP Addresses

In the framework of a case in which a defendant was being investigated for fraudulently altering someone else’s billing records, the defendant motioned for the annulment of an evidentiary measure requested by the Prosecutor, which consisted of asking the National Tax Authority, without court authorization, to reveal an IP (Internet Protocol) address used to request an address change.

The Tax Authority provided the numbers, date and time of the transactions, including, among other things, the point of sale and IP address from where the electronic receipts were generated. Then, with that information, the Prosecutor requested further information from several Internet service providers to determine who had been assigned a specific IP address and what their physical address was, including the defendant’s address.

The defendant based his motion to annul on the fact that the information requested and obtained without court authorization consisted of the personal data of the holders of the IP addresses in question, which should be protected by the right to privacy pursuant to section 18 of the Argentine Constitution and by Data Protection Law No. 25,326. Thus, the requested report should be considered equivalent to a “telephone interception” pursuant to sections 5, 21, and 22 of Law No. 25,520 on national intelligence.

The Court of Appeals did not agree with these arguments and stated that an IP address constitutes the identification of the network interface that allows verifying who the internet service provider is, but does not imply access to personal data or enable accessing the content of the communications exchanged, the email account of its owner or the pages visited.

In this sense, it argued that the Data Protection Law did not apply to the case and that the request did not require court authorization as no secret information was revealed because the data obtained was only nominative and did disclose the content of the Internet user’s information; it is possible to collect an IP address without invading the sphere of privacy of the address owner.

For all the above, the Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s (known locally as “first instance” court) decision and rejected motion to annul.