Whowas Service -- More Evidence that Whois IS a Privacy Issue

Perhaps different TLDs ought to have different privacy rules, depending on their intended purpose. There are very different standards to be expected of commercial sites, noncommercial sites, and personal sites.

A domain intended specifically for personal use, like .name or several subdomains in country codes (.me.[CCTLD]), should have a high degree of privacy protection, with only bare minimal info available by default to the public. (In fact, there is a proposal by the .name registry to enact such restrictions in an amendment of their ICANN agreement.)

Domains intended for noncommercial uses, but not necessarily personal (e.g., .org), need some sensitivity to privacy protection; there may be politically sensitive things like protest and dissident groups that fear persecution and have legitimate need to hide their location and contact information. On the other hand, since such organizations may be soliciting donations from the public, there are many circumstances where they require accountability in ways that private individuals do not, so their privacy rights might not be as unbreakable.

Domains intended for commercial use (.com, .biz) arguably have little or no expectation of privacy; doing business generally requires accountability that comes from having one's contact information be publicly available. One can still use such things as P.O. boxes and maildrops to keep some degree of privacy.

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Irony?
by isquat on Wednesday January 15 2003, @09:14PM (#10973)
User #3363 Info | http://i.squ.at/

Is it ironic that the whois data for dialog.com (the domain where the database is available) is incomplete? Maybe it should be disabled immediately and deleted in 15 days to set an example to all the "cybersquatters"? What use will Thompson's whois have, if data are missing?
So let's set an example. Thompson might even benefit from it.

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