The Mad Rants of a Raving Genius

This is a most tech rant, so some of you probably won’t care about it at all. But it’s also a privacy rights rant, so I suppose there’s something for everyone. I might even mention kittens. All right, I just did. Moving on…

There’s a service on the Internet called Whois. You can think of it like the phone book for the Internet. Basically, it stores the registration data for owners of millions of web domains (like mine). This can be a very useful tool for various reasons. Since it lists things like phone numbers and addresses for domain owners, it can be useful for tracking down pirates, spammers, and other problem-causing website owners. The IP address side of Whois has helped me many times identify the people who spam my blog so I could report them to their Internet service provider.

But there are some out there who want to do away with Whois entirely. They call themselves privacy advocates, but I have a feeling most of them just don’t like the idea of the law being able to track them down for doing illegal things. Privacy advocates can be like that sometimes. Anyways, the whole thing annoys me. A large group of these people are pushing to remove the Whois requirements placed on domain registrars (the companies you pay to get a .com, .net, .whatever) so people don’t have to put their contact info on a publicly accessible database. This will make it much harder to find the owners of illegal websites, as you can no doubt guess. What torrent site owner is really going to put his name and phone number on the Internet if he doesn’t have to?

The other thing that bugs me is the idea of getting rid of the phone book because you don’t want your name in it. Most (reputable) domain registrars have an option that will allow you to avoid putting your name in the Whois database entirely. It generally costs more, but it ensures your complete privacy. They still have to put information for the domain owner, but they’ll use company information. Not just anyone can find out who you are. Click on the Whois link up there for my domain and you’ll not see my name or contact information anywhere. I don’t like spam.

Of course, this isn’t good enough for the privacy advocates, and it cements my suspicions that most of them are up to no good. While your information isn’t publicly accessible if you pay extra, certain people (such as the authorities) can still get your information by contacting your web host or domain registrar. You won’t get spammed, but you can still get caught. Ditch the database entirely, and you can pursue illegitimate activities in complete anonymity. I can see right through their dastardly scheme…

Perhaps I’m misrepresenting the people who want Whois gone. Perhaps. But when you read an article where they claim that there are no legitimate uses of Whois, you have to wonder if something’s up (indeed, spammers often make use of Whois, but so do law enforcement officials…at least one of those is legit). Again, I know that most of my regular readers won’t really care about this, but as a quasi-privacy rights guy, I figured I’d chime in. I may hold my privacy dear, but if I have nothing to hide, why should I fight to hide it?