Ofcom is appealing to the courts against a decision by the Information Tribunal, on 4 September, which ruled that the data on a website which gives details on all the mobile-phone masts in the UK should be released in a comprehensive and searchable form. This upheld an earlier ruling by the information commissioner in September 2006.
Media watchdog Ofcom has provided the Sitefinder website since December 2003 after an independent expert group recommended the government set up a national database to provide the public with details of where base stations were located and their emissions.
Until last year the data uploaded to the website was provided voluntarily by the mobile-network operators. But they stopped providing data last year after the information commissioner ordered Ofcom to release information considered to be "commercially sensitive" about each mobile-phone base station and their grid references to Health Protection Scotland (HPS).
Ofcom had previously refused to disclose the information following a freedom-of-information request from HPS, applicable under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004.
Ofcom argued that disclosing the requested information would contravene the intellectual-property rights of the mobile-network operators. It told the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) that making the raw data available would give competitors the ability to work out how each operator's 2G or 3G radio networks were designed.
Ofcom also said that publication of a searchable national data set would compromise the security of the police and emergency service radio network. People would then be able to target and close down specific geographic areas by identifying key locations vital to the police communication infrastructure.
Ruling against Ofcom, the ICO decided that a determined terrorist or criminal could obtain information about the location of Tetra masts by manually searching for each base station on Sitefinder. It therefore deemed that publication of the requested information would not present an adverse risk to public safety over and above the present situation.
Ofcom also failed to demonstrate that any actual harm to the mobile operators, such as a loss of return on their investment in creating the database, would arise from disclosure.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Ofcom confirmed that it was appealing against the tribunal's decision on how the public interest, "in balancing the public right to information and the protection of sensitive business information", should be assessed.
"Because much of the underlying data is considered by the mobile-network operators as commercially sensitive, and as a whole its disclosure could lead to malicious or criminal damage to the networks, the mobile-network operators told Ofcom that they would be reluctant to continue providing it for the Sitefinder database if it was released publicly," the statement read.
Ofcom remains confident that it will be able to persuade mobile-network operators to provide updated information for the website in the future, but admits that failure to do so would mean Sitefinder "would cease to be a valuable information tool for the public".
A date for the court hearing has yet to be set.
