17
votes
First GDPR ruling: German court finds collecting domain registrar techincal/admin contact info violates Article 5
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- Title
- German Court Issues First GDPR Ruling
- Published
- Sep 10 2018
- Word count
- 136 words
Boom! About time! I have been getting a lot of scam calls lately about my domains. I need to get moved to name cheap. But my .it domain can never move and never be private.
I never understood why some TLD require WHOIS to be public. I mean, you don't need to share personal information when setting up an email address.
Could someone help me understand the main reasons behind forcing public registration of domain names.
Accountability.
What's my recourse if you use your website (somewhere around the world) to do something that's illegal or harms me or a group I'm a part of?
It takes ages to get information from another country, even in terms of legal requests, if a that country even complies with requests.
In open, democratic societies, the question is usually the opposite: what narrow, well-justified reason is there for something not to be part of the public record?
100% agree on the accountability front. If a website is distributing malware, for example, it would be nice to track them down.
To the point of a well-justified reason to not have that kind of information on the public record... privacy. That really is it. I don't like the idea of having my home address publicly available for a criminal to exploit and use against me. Yes, there is domain privacy settings, but some TLD don't allow that and force the buyers personal information to be public.
I am legally guaranteed information to hold publishers of all other media to account. Why should the web be different?
It's unreasonable to expect a level of privacy that renders the owner of a platform of mass communication unaccountable.
This is why there are whois privacy guards which uses a general catch all contact. This can be queried for information should a legit reason be brought up. But having the information publicly available removes any sort of security and leaves individuals open for attack.
Let's say I run a personal blog expressing less than popular opinions, not "hate speech", not violence, simply expressing an opinion that some might disagree with. I'm well within my rights of free speech, but if someone doesn't like that, I can end up doxxed, bullied, or murdered all because I need to be held accountable for my opinions? No, sorry, thats not going to fly with me.
In this case, the whois privacy guard would act as a first line of defense to protect the domain owner because attempting to obtain my personal information, in this case, is not for a valid reason.