Letter to ICANN: WHOIS Database a Violation Of Privacy

[RJ]

Fifty consumer groups and civil liberty organizations have composed an open letter to ICANN, blasting the public WHOIS database as contributing to identity theft, spam, and other privacy violations and demanding reconsideration of the policy of requiring domain owners to publicize their contact information.

"The WHOIS database was originally intended to allow network administrators to find and fix problems to maintain the stability of the Internet. It now exposes domain name registrants' personal information to many other users for many other purposes unrelated to network access. Anyone with Internet access can now have access to WHOIS data, and that includes stalkers, governments that restrict dissidents' activities, law enforcement agents without legal authority, and spammers. The original purpose for WHOIS should be reestablished."

Letter is here
http://www.thepublicvoice.org/whoisletter.html

Do you agree or disagree with this? How do you feel about having to disclose your private information to the world as a stipulation of owning a domain name?

 

[Delete]

I am against whois. I think only the registrar should have your info for legal and account issues but nobody else should see it. Only an email should be shown on whois.

 

[Chris_C]

I'm on the fence on this one.

Namely people don't complain about having their personal information published in the local telephone pages. (In some ways whois is also a free yellowpages listing for a site as well). At the same time you can opt out of being included in the phone book where you can't with the domain system.

Secondly, publishing accurate and current whois information to the public does to some extent provide a "community policing" service on illegal and undesirable sites. This IMO is quite important as there is some stuff that should be squashed immediately & the requirement of adding personal information does I'm sure cause some pause. Would change things much if whois was private I'm not sure... Would ICANN have the resources to police this type of thing themselves, I'm certain they would not.

At any rate, I think there is a lot more wrong with the whole domain regulation system than just the current whois. Unfair competition by those in power (i.e. verisign), microsoft, and even netscape. (I peaked when I noticed that NS V7 changed their search format for typing in urls. Explicitly tricking users used to the previous system into doing a search based upon the url instead of taking them to it directly). Not to mention a system that drops domains to be picked up within milliseconds only by those with huge $$. I'd rather see them immediately go into a pool style auction system where the profits go back into regulating and improving the overall system itself.

 

[redhippo]

i tend to agree with Chris. ditto his clear explaination. thanks for speaking up for the fence sitters:cy:

 

[Dave_Z]

As far as I know, one registrar, Netsol (yup, the ever evil Netsol! :lol: ) created their system in such a way as to input 2 sets of contact data: one that's shown in WHOIS, the other only w/c Netsol sees and the domain contacts know but the public don't.

On the other hand, it does to seem degree stop some of those damn scammers out there.

Some registrars, again Netsol and GoDaddy for example, configured their WHOIS in such a way that you need to input a screen-generated code before seeing the info. That's supposed to prevent scripts from email harvesting.

All in all, although I don't relish anyone seeing my contact info so as not to be compromised in any way, I think a balance can be made on this.

What do you guys think?

 

[JMJ]

It's all information you can find in any phone book. If you don't want people to see it then get with a registrar that offers a private whois.

 

[RJ]

Personally, I'd rather have the option to publically provide a name and e-mail address only. The registrar could hold the other information and provide it to legal authorities or the courts if the need arose. Why is it neccessary to publish my phone number to anyone who wants to know it?

 

[Terry]

Originally posted by Chris_C
[ I'd rather see them immediately go into a pool style auction system where the profits go back into regulating and improving the overall system itself. [/B]

I agree with most of what has been said here, but I would like to see expired domains be reissued in a fixed price lottery.