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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