At 6/12/02 4:58 PM, Derek J. Balling wrote: >But just as I can walk into the local town clerk's office and get the >name, address, phone-number, of the person who pays the land next >door me, the "right to be anonymous" in this case is NOT the same as >the generic "right to privacy".
This was covered recently on the list. People often use the example of property records as a justification for why domain ownership records should be public, but the similarities are superficial: The purchase of a domain name has nothing like the societal consequences and responsibilities of a land purchase. Also, the suggestion that people should disclose their identity in order to be permitted to use part of a public resource is not one I find compelling. You could use the same argument to suggest that the names of everyone who takes a dog to a park should be public, in case it bites someone (or poops on the sidewalk without the owner cleaning it up, for that matter). Dog ownership records are not public, though (at least not where I live), because part of the generic right to privacy is indeed the right to anonymity when utilizing a public resource, unless there is a compelling argument to the contrary. >"long held"? I'd like to see your documentation on that. Public >records were generally quite available to anyone who walked in the >clerk's office until probably the last 20 years or so. Of course. Some records are public by law, when there is a compelling reason for that. Some important legal matters, such as property ownership and marriage information, tend to be public records. Many other records, such as dog ownership and driver's licenses, are not public, or have restrictions on who can view them. The question is into which category domain name ownership should fall. You're right that courts and legislatures seem to have tightened up the restrictions in recent years, but I think that just proves my point -- people in charge of systems that contain this kind of information need to be more careful now, because there is less tolerance for willy-nilly disclosure. >There are plenty of compelling reasons why $RANDOM_PERSON would need >access on a random basis for the contact information for >$RANDOM_DOMAIN. In times of network abuse, outages, etc. etc., the >contact information in WHOIS is invaluable, and the need to access it >in real-time is often critical. Fair enough -- that's a reasonable claim made for why it should be public. As it happens, I don't really agree (in cases of abuse or outage, contacting the WHOIS address is nowhere near as useful as contacting the ISP running the services for the domain based on the IP address from a nameserver lookup), but that's not my real point, and we don't disagree that much -- there are certainly circumstances where *some* people need to know domain contact information (transfers, law enforcement, etc.). My real point was that it seemed you were trying to dismiss the discussion of whether WHOIS information should be private by making an (unreasonable, to my mind) assertion that people have no particular right to or expectation of privacy in general, unless they can demonstrate a specific need for it. Perhaps you didn't mean to put it quite so strongly, but if you did, that's putting the burden in the wrong place, and I'm positive the vast majority of domain owners would agree. ------------------------------------ Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
