Canadian Domain Name Registrants To Get More Privacy

An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which manages the dot-ca domain, plans to change its WHOIS policy to better protect domain name registrants. Quoting the Canadian Press: '[Law Professor Michael] Geist said the changes have raised the ire of law enforcement and intellectual property lawyers, who have used the Whois search to track down sexual predators and copyright violators.' Despite this, the organization seems committed to following through with the reforms." Geist also gave a talk recently about digital advocacy; the effectiveness of using modern technology to raise concerns and share ideas about issues such as privacy and copyright law.

Comments

Spams and scams

[telchine]

From my experience, WHOIS details are mostly used by spammers and scammers. I get a steady stream of snail mail from scammers trying to pretend that they are my registrar and want me to renew with them (for a significant sum of course).

I've never had any legitimate mail sent to the snail mail address that I use to register my domains.

I get a torrent of spams to my registered email addresses. Ocassionally I get offers to buy my domains or just people wanting to contact me but that's may 1 or 2 emails a year.

I think having contact details in WHOIS is an archaic system left over from the days were everyone on the Internet was polite to each other (or something). It should be scrapped and only law enforcement agencies with a warrant should be able to access my contact details.

Re:Falsification ought to be criminal

[value_added]

But a domain name was never meant to be private. Insisting upon privacy for what should be public information is a mis-use of the resource.

And I'm still moaning that email was never meant to be anything but text. ;-)

The purpose of the legislation is to address the continuing increase in personal domain registrations. It's entirely conceivable that one day, everyone will be required or will otherwise want to register in some form. That leaves us in a difficult position where the traditional approach of making everything public must be balanced with the privacy needs of millions of new registrations by ordinary individuals.

Resolving that conflict by admitting no one anticipated this state of affairs, or saying this isn't how things are supposed to work, is hardly satisfactory. And when you mix in the changing interests or requirements of all the parties involved, ranging from the various internet authorities, to law enforcement, ISPs, network administrators, all the way down to Dick and Jane, I can't see how anyone could say let's just leave it alone.

Hell, it wasn't too long ago that ATT would routinely publish whois info for their fixed IP accounts. Makes perfect sense, until you realise it doesn't.

One approach, or workaround, would be to advise (require) everyone to hire a personal lawyer to handle everything; the registration info would be public, but the personal information would remain personal. Another would be what the Canadian government is doing. Personally, I expect all this will work itself out in time, but I worry that we'll find ourselves in a very different world than when we first started.