[ga] RE: WHOIS accuracy, and name deletions

["Abel Wisman" <abel@able-towers.com>]

Considering the fact that you would hardly ever be accidentally sending
mailboms, that is not a very valid point.
Furthermore, only the person running the mailserver can do "anything"
about that, whether you like it or not.
Therefore the knowledge of your homeaddress and phonenumber are
irrelevant.

I furthermore state that there are many reasons why your county clerk
example does not hold any validity either, the least one being that such
records are limited and that you can not simply request all landowners
of the state of New York for free should you so desire, let allone the
whole of the USA and the whois database has more entries then the USA
has citizens.

Privacy however is the main reason why it should not be "public" and any
analogy with "brick & mortar" life as for access-rights should imo
definitely be made. After all IP constituencies can not simply access
all data there and have no reason of law-enforcement to access that
data. It has been long established that such cases in the "brick &
mortar" world need more then just opening up a database, there is no
reason to change that on the internet.

Privacy laws in several countries (most of the EU f.i.) and also in the
USA (Ca) are becoming more and more aware of this problem and are
getting more and more restrictive (thank whoever).

There is not 1 valid reason why "every Tom Dick & Harry" should have
access to your personal details such as your restricted phonenumber and
home address, you can try, but until today noone has succeeded in
finding one.

The argument that "in the USA we...whatever" holds no credit either
since the internet is a lot more then just the USA.

Whois was never meant to be used as it is today, and the problems
arising from that current usage are far bigger then most realize, Spam
being just a very small proportion of it.

I for one offer my clients registration in my name to protect their
data, for free.

With kind regards

Abel Wisman

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-discuss-list@opensrs.org 
> [mailto:owner-discuss-list@opensrs.org] On Behalf Of Derek J. Balling
> Sent: 08 January 2003 12:06
> To: discuss-list@opensrs.org; ga@dnso.org
> Subject: Re: WHOIS accuracy, and name deletions
> 
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 05:32  PM, Robert L Mathews wrote:
> > - that nowadays, people who hold domains are unlikely to run the
> > services
> >   for them or feel responsible to the community -- or if 
> they do run 
> > the
> >   services and there's a problem with that domain, they are 
> probably 
> > the
> >   cause of that problem, so there's little point in complaining to 
> > them;
> 
> Errr, I'm not sure I understand the logic of this argument. If "I" as 
> the domain-holder am the cause of an accidental mailbomb, why 
> SHOULDN'T 
> $victim have easy access to my contact info so that I can get it 
> corrected on my end?
> 
> > - that anyone who is actually a "bad guy" is likely to 
> provide bad data
> >   anyway, and that if the policy changes to drop domains 
> with obviously
> >   invalid WHOIS data like "Mickey Mouse", it's trivially 
> easy to start
> >   providing false data that doesn't appear blatantly bad;
> 
> True. But I don't think that makes "accurate data" any less a "best 
> practice".
> 
> > - that when my customers first become aware of the fact that their
> >   information is publicly available, almost all of them are 
> appalled,
> >   and a few have even canceled their registrations as a 
> result (in one
> >   extreme case, a customer was a witness to a murder who 
> had kept his
> >   address secret for years for fear of retaliation, then happened to
> > find
> >   it was available to anyone with a Web browser after 
> registering his
> >   domain name);
> 
> Provide this as a service to your users. Register the domains in your 
> name, etc. etc. I think someone on this list even offers this type of 
> service in a "generic" sense, if I remember correctly from the last 
> time this thread came up. :)
> 
> > - that since the gross privacy violations of public WHOIS 
> far outweigh
> >   the benefits, public WHOIS should therefore be completely 
> abolished,
> >   with WHOIS data available only to people who actually need it
> >   (registrars, law enforcement, etc.), much like driver's license
> >   records are now only available to insurance companies, law
> > enforcement,
> >   and so forth.
> 
> It's not a privacy violation if you have no expectation of 
> privacy. Use 
> of a domain is the same to my mind as the ownership of land. 
> Just like 
> I can walk into the county clerk's office and pull the land-ownership 
> records for a parcel of land, I see nothing functionally different 
> between that and "pulling the virtual land-ownership record of the 
> domain next door".
> 
> Before you make the "ease of access" argument, remember that many 
> town/county clerks are putting their data online, and it's only a 
> matter of time before most/all of that data is available as easily as 
> WHOIS data is.
> 
> I'm not going to dispute that there are varying opinions on 
> this, so I 
> don't want Robert to think I'm picking on him or anything, 
> but just as 
> there are counter-arguments to the points I've made, there are also 
> counter-arguments to some of his. ;-)
> 
> D
> 


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