Sunday, July 5, 2015

URGENT ALERT FOR WRITERS: If you own your domain name, your private info could be exposed!

Hi everybody, 

An important privacy/security issue was brought to my attention by writer Vivian Cameron. If you own your own domain name, your legal name and home address could soon be exposed to everyone! This is a huge personal safety issue. 


Here's what Vivian has to say (if you're not sure what ICANN or WHOIS is, see the definitions at the end): 

I spend a lot if time in the cycbersecurity arena for my day-job and have seen some truly wicked crap. So, it would be wrong to not inform every one of my peeps who uses the Internet about the invasion of privacy bull**** ICANN is trying to pull:

http://www.techworm.net/2015/06/exposing-the-whois-data-by-icann-can-place-users-privacy-in-jeopardy.html
There are many ways this can impact authors. if you registered your author domain as commercial/for your business, this is a huge. Under new guidelines proposed by MarkMonitor, domain holders with sites associated to "commercial activity" will no longer be able to protect their private information with WHOIS protection services. Your privacy provider could be forced to publish your contact data in WHOIS or give it out to anyone who complains about your website, without due process. That means without a court order. Nada. Nuttin’, honey.
In my circumstance, this amounts to a personal safety issue as it might with others. Imagine how exposed I would be if my personal information were entered here:

http://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=viviancameron.com

Creeped out yet? Now, try your domain here: http://whois.icann.org/en

I’m screaming via http://respectourprivacy.com and calling ICANN as well (Is it any surprise their phone now seems to be off the hook?). The close date for comments is July 7, 2015.
If anyone would like further info, please contact me.

Vivian Cameron
Somewhat Gothic...Always Romantic

E-mail me: Vivian@VivianCameron.com
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VivianCameron
Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/VivianCameron

ICANN = The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a nonprofit organization that is responsible for the coordination of maintenance and methodology of several databases of unique identifiers - like your domain name

WHOIS =  stores the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system.  When registering a domain, one can choose to have a private registration.  Now, imagine how exposed each of us would be if ICANN eliminated private registration. 

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing. I checked mine & it gives the GiDaddy info only. But I would be terrified to have my legal info on there for anyone to see.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You could get a privacy protection added (for a few extra dollars). Mine is through domainsbyproxy

    ReplyDelete