Yes thats wonderful, and we users like to see them stand up to the *IAA’s of the world, but it will be all for naught.

The FIRST thing that will happen next is, the industry will turn to their bought-and-paid-for legislators, judges and lawmakers and have that little loophole closed. Watch, it will happen very soon.

Tele2 later said in another interview that in fact they do save IP address logs for two weeks in order to be able to, as they say, counter things like viruses spam. In that interview they claimed that this is what they have been saying from the beginning.

Personally I would trust Bahnhof much more than Tele2 for these reasons:
1) The CEO of Bahnhof is a friend to Oscar Swartz who started the business, and Swartz is now one of the leading bloggers who defend privacy and fight for copyright reform.
2) Bahnhof was in 2005 subjected to some seemingly unlawful and very unorthodox actions where it seems the Police has been manipulated by the content industry. For example there are indications that the content industry paid infiltrators considerable sums of money to insert illegal material into Bahnhof servers prior to a raid (the raid was approved by Tomas Norström who was also the judge in the Pirate Bay trial). Having had first hand experience of violations like this probably make Bahnhof take greater care to protect their customers.

Of course both ISPs are motivated by economic aspects – giving the customers the privacy they want – but at least one of them have a good understanding of what the content industries represent.

The CEO of Bahnhof recently wrote the following in a comment on Oscar Swartz’s blog:

Yes, I think it was 2001 or possibly 2002 (don’t remember exactly) but actually I’ve been in contact with Antipiratbyrån [the Swedish anti-piracy agency] before!

They asked us if we could help them spread and plant trojans on our customers’ computers (even externally). It were supposed to be some form of “measurement” that they wanted to make… Everything was said to be “top secret”. Of course we declined and I don’t know what other ISP approved to that thing.

I work on a system – not an isp, there’s tons of logs we keep. I’m sure they’re not keeping a log that would implicate their user but wouldn’t they keep some sort of log to monitor service, uptime, ect? Wouldn’t logs such as these be necessary for troubleshooting? I also wonder if they opt not to monitor infected computers and their attempts to spread across their network?

Good for them. Consumers that are aware get treated well by vendors. The Swedes are much more aware of these issues thanks to the RIAA attacks on The Pirate Bay.

But as for unintended consequences, say bye bye to police ability to use IP addresses and logs to track down and convict people who commit actual crimes online. This was feasible when done with warrants and legitimate investigations. Because of the RIAA and their ilk, ISPs need to throw out their data to satisfy their customers, and now the real terrorists and criminals will also benefit.

Thanks RIAA.