This is something I have mixed feelings about. The ICANN working group is trying to hammer out some sort of privacy policy on the various whois databases. It’s gotten to a point where they’re thinking of mandating simply shutting it down at the end of 2008 if an agreement isn’t hammered out between the various members. This is good in one way, bad in others.

I as a businessperson feel that the fact that people can look me up on whois and that I’m not hiding anything re this domain name gives me some credibility when people are entrusting payment to me.

I as a green aware citizen am sick to death of calling or writing to get off ALL the junk mail lists that I keep getting on simply because I’m the registered owner of a bunch of domain names. Not to mention the fact that I don’t care to be marketed to (at all, actually) with every step I take and just having that name, address, phone, and email out there seems to invite that. Get this straight, you corporate marketing types. I don’t want anything you’re selling. Period.

And one has to wonder about all that information floating around on the web and the various ways it can be collated. Tying my name and address and other personal info to domain names that are niche specific gives anyone looking pieces of information about me that could become, if used for marketing or more intrusive or underhanded reasons, a definite privacy concern.

But it goes beyond that, and these are truly thorny issues. As a website owner I’ve occasionally used a whois database to mail a cease and desist letter to another website owner who had stolen my copyrighted content. I’ve used whois to find the person who owned an unused domain name I ultimately bought. And I’ve looked up whois on a couple domains where I was considering a purchase to check information against that on the website, and to do BBB checks.

The article states that Law Enforcement, trademark lawyers, journalists and spammers all use the databases regularly. And judging from my snailmail box full of credit card offers, car insurance crap, aoHell CDs, and other treekilling and worthless pieces of paper, they aren’t the only ones.

The article also states that one of the people in the group is an ex-AT&T exec. Does that worry anyone besides me?

Technorati Tags: whois, ICANN, privacy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 8:31 am and is filed under Web News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.