DOMAIN PRIVACY AND THE REALITIES OF DOMAINS

[billwhedon]

The latest buzzphrase is "Domain Privacy", and what it means to the ISP is more revenue. That they can charge you a monthly or annual "drag" for uuuuhhh doing nothing! When you register a new domain name with them, they simply won't put your informationin the WHOIS records. Ain't that special?

Now, the rationale is that the evil spammers who automatically search the WHOIS database won't be able to try to sell you stuff at your "owner's" IDs. Wonderful. But it also provides something else - a hiding place for those very spammers, sites with pornography (including child pornography), and other people engaged in web commerce of any questionable nature!

Suddenly, you can't find out who to go after for wasting your time, bandwidth, and email storage space, with drivel about their Wonderful Product that you don't want, but that they advertise incessantly. It's been made more difficult to find certain types of individuals who really need to be found - stalkers, pedophiles, and other criminals.

I think it's time to call a moratorium on "Domain Privacy" offerings, worldwide. If you can't stand to have the light shining on you as the owner of XYZ website, maybe there's a reason that light should be shining!

Oh, I have about 20 domains registered to my name, not "protected" by DP. Nobody spams their associated email addresses any more than any other email address I have. But if someone does, I want to know who to go after!

[BigWhiteDog]

One of my specialties is recovering "lost" domains for our clients. This can be as simple as the client having no idea as to where it is registered or what the user name and password is to as complex as hijacking by an ex-webmaster or employee and sold to a domain aggregator. Domain privacy registrations really make this process difficult and costly and sometimes the courts have to become needlessly involved just to find out the domain IS actually still registered to the client.

I have over 100 domains registered using my email and physical addresses and other than the occasional fishing expedition by Domain Registry of America (and their reincarnations) I get no more junk mail than anybody else in the office. I have yet to meet someone who actually had a real need for this service and I don't do business with companies that use it because they appear to be trying to hide something.

[wige]

FuDomain privacy is not very effective protection for criminals - it does not protect against the magic of the search warrant. It may slow down a private citizen who is trying to track a spammer, and blind press inquiries by preventing easy access to the identification of what company registered the domain name, but that information can be falsified anyway. The domain registration details are frequently irrelevant in a criminal investigation because it is more telling who is paying for the server space where the crime was committed, and for that you need a search warrant anyway.