Online Privacy Rights

[Christopher Marshall <christophermarshall98@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear ICANN,

Regarding the proposed rules governing companies that provide WHOIS privacy
services (as set forth in the Privacy and Policy Services Accreditation
Issues Policy document):

I urge you to respect internet user's right to privacy and due process.
- Everyone deserves the right to privacy.
- No person's personal information should be revealed without a court
order, regardless of whether the request comes from a private individual or
law enforcement agency.

The world is full of enough troublemakers, scammers, spammers and
annoyances. By revealing personal information, you're helping those people
to get hold of more information, which will end up resulting in more spam,
scamming phone calls, and potentially much worse situations.

By allowing anyone to receive this personal information, you're
inadvertently allowing such people to get their hands on private and
confidential information. This is immoral and wrong, it should not be
allowed to happen. Enough nuisance phone calls, emails .etc happen already.
It's time to help prevent this.

A court order would deter many (if not all) of these scammers from even
attempting to get their hands on personal information. It would also mean
that one company alone cannot decide the fate of thousands of customers and
will ensure that only genuine requests will be successful in retrieving
personal information.

Whether a company is commercial or not, in my opinion, does not have any
impact on how personal information should be handled. Allowing users to get
access to personal information well outweighs the benefits, and it can only
end badly.

Private information should be kept private. Thank you.