The Relation between Privacy and Security in Data Retention – An Overview of Certain Percentage of Croatian Citizens’ Opinion

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to define citizens' views on the use of telephone call lists and location (without content), i.e. the retention of, and access to retained data about, telecommunications traffic by the police for the purpose of preventing and detecting offenders, and searching for missing persons and objects. The research aimed to answer the question of whether the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), by placing the right to privacy before the right to security, took into account the rights of victims of crime and the humanitarian aspect of saving people and property; and to identify acceptable data protection measures, transparency, and control mechanisms to access the data. The data were collected through an online questionnaire between September 25, 2018 and November 13, 2018 on a sample of 252 subjects, and then processed using the PASW Statistics 18.0 statistical package. The results show that both security and privacy are equally important to citizen. The results also showed that under clearly defined conditions, citizens find it acceptable to restrict privacy in order to maintain a satisfactory level of security. It was also evident that citizens do not see police as someone potentially misusing the retained data, but they think that the problem lies in the protection of data by telecommunications service providers and the transparency of checking access to retained data.