Speak Out On Whois Privacy

Privacy, both online and offline, are important concepts.

Privacy also goes hand in hand with security.

Security and privacy. Two concepts that you’ll see discussed a lot when it comes to the online world.

Unfortunately there are some people who equate people’s desires for online privacy to equate with criminality. That is, in our view, plain wrong.

Under Irish and European law privacy isn’t just an “afterthought”. We’ve got a lot of laws in place to help protect our privacy.

When it comes to domain names, however, you have to provide quite a lot of information in order to register a domain name. But most domain registration companies, including ourselves, offer users the option to hide their personal contact details in the whois directory when they register a .com domain name.

There are a lot of valid reasons why people choose not to publish their private contact details in the public whois. As long as they’re not breaking any laws why shouldn’t they?

Unfortunately there are moves afoot to change the rules around whois privacy services which could adversely impact you.

At the moment if someone wants to access the underlying details they’d have to follow due process. This could be made go away, which is worrying.

You can read more about the proposed changes here.

If you think these proposed changes are a bad idea please either sign the petition or submit a comment to ICANN.