WHOIS privacy, social medias and third-party WHOIS websites

[Lady Harken <ladyharken@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear sir or madam,

 

I saw your new draft concerning changes about the WHOIS privacy.

In our current age, social medias (Facebook, Twitter) are everywhere, and
their influence is near-limitless. Particularly, "revenge" posts are a new
trend on these channels, and consists of revealing "very" personal
information about an individual in order to ruin its perception by the "rest
of the world".

This has led to a lot of legal issues, but also to a lot of worse things :
People getting fired from their jobs because they had a "weird hobby,
political, religious, sexual orientation, etc", people ending their lives
because they could not bear the constant rejection around them after those
revelations, and so on. It's on the news, this is no secret.

 

These people are very often normal, nice people, who wouldn't hurt a fly.
They just happen to have a side of them they wanted to express (through a
website, commercial or not, in this case) under anonymity.

 

This is the era we live in, this is now. By lessening people's privacy, you
are doing something VERY DANGEROUS to the lives of many. I understand there
are criminals in the lot who deserve to be found and punished, but their
percentage is small compared to the good folks out there. I urge you to
please reconsider these privacy changes.

 

I would like to take this chance to talk about a linked privacy problem:
WHOIS mirror websites. These websites, owned by third parties, crawl WHOIS
data regularly and record them on their servers. They reject any request to
remove a website from their database, meaning it's available for anyone to
see.

This would theoretically not be a problem if WHOIS privacy was working
properly, but sometimes it's not.

I've seen a registar (whose name I won't disclose), having a hiccup in its
WHOIS setting, and exposing user's data (how many, I don't know), which was
theoretically hidden behind WHOIS protection, in the public domain for
several weeks/months.

This resulted in those WHOIS mirror sites to record the real information of
those persons and store them in their database.

As they don't accept change requests, that information is available to
anyone who finds the website. Hell, some even make this a business and can
reveal info for some money!

This is a clear breach of privacy, and all websites displaying WHOIS data
with an historic should be taken down. Public WHOIS data should be available
on a "live" basis but its history should not be visible except with a court
order.

Believe it or not, but there are a ton of those websites up and running on
the Internet right now...

 

Thanks for your time reading this.

 

Regards.