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A privacy issue that needs to be corrected. I love the concept and idea of Dot Tel domain names and have posted on this forum on several occassions however there is a real serious issue/bug that I feel could destroy the reputation of these domains in a very short time. This issue deals with the topic of basic privacy outside of the domain. First I will explain the problem and then I will explain what I see as a solution. This bug consists of the information shared by the whois system of Telnic. Although it is more private than some other domain names, I feel, that it is a topic that Telnic should take very seriously since the concept of a dot tel is mainly to represent personal and business entities. Here is the issue. Pretend a woman named Jennifer decides to buy the dot tel domain name 'Jen.tel'. Although Jen wants to expose certain information she definitely wants to control what is shared. Jen populates her domain name with basic information and tell all of my friends about it. After sharing her information Jen, like many other Dot Tel registrants, is not familiar with the fact that anyone can do a whois lookup on what her first and last name is. This information must be correct since if it isn't the domain can be taken away from Jen. Is this the problem that I am referring to? No it is much bigger than this. Like anyone else that uses a Dot Tel, Jen loves using it and decides to register a Dot Tel for her husband on her husband's birthday. Likewise she does the same populating his telephone number etc. She then proceeds to register a name for each of her companies she owns to make sure that no one else registers her brands. Now with this picture is that there are several companies that record Whois information such as this company: www.sitelogr.com"%2B"Jennifer"&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=f&oq=&gs_rfai=" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...f&oq=&gs_rfai= You can change the name to any other name to collect information. So if a person stalks her at work, using the whois information he could put the following profile together. Jen's real name is 'Jennifer XYZ'. Jennifer has registered another males name which is probably her husband or kid. She has also registered three different companies which are in her area and she will probably be visiting at some time. Take this situation. Instead of a stalker lets say the person is out to extort money from small businesses which is one of the target markets of Telnic domains. If they cut and paste the whois information belonging to 'Jen' and try to tie it directly to scams Jen's whole life is down the tube. Secondly there are people who target small businesses to extort money. This is a growing issue since you'll have one person hammering hundreds of companies at a time in an attempt to kill brands until the company submits to their demands. Here is one example of many people running this scam-> http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...&hl=en&ct=clnk The only solution to this problem is to block the whois information. If someone has a beef with a domain they can always take steps to access the information. General availability for whois data so that people can create databases is not a good idea in my opinion. There is something seriously wrong if a person can do a Google search on another person and tie all domain names (with info) owned by that person together. Ron Munson |
Telnic already allows registrants to withhold their information from the public facing whois database. It's still available upon request, through a special interface, but only for certain justifiable reasons. The option to do this should be visible in your registrar's dashboard. |
The matter about importance of privacy was already raised few times in other topics in this forum. The only result of this was that now you can hide your address and contacts but not your name. It generally known that it is not safe to exposure your real name in Internet, and Telnic need to stop that practice of disclosing any personal data of its customers. Why Telnic still persist on that evil practice, I personally do not understand. |
The privacy policy in WHOIS is defined by ICANN and Telnic, as described in the WHOIS Policy. |
I don't really see it being Tenic's fault but rather something that needs to be corrected. If it doesn't get addressed, I see it as only a matter of time before the powerful concept of dot tel gets tarnished beyond repair. Really the policy must be changed. It doesn't make any sense keeping this information open to the public especially for personal profiles that dot tel promotes. There is no use having privacy settings in a dot tel if people must volunteer their first and last name to the public regardless. There are a spiral of problems that happen with Whois exposure. Here is another example. Roy registers a dot tel using a company name RoyInvestorRelations.tel. Within a month his personal information is put online and picked up by a whole list of third party sites that collect whois information and publish them online. Why are these third party sites doing this? For multiple reasons. First of all one of the biggest challenges of a website is to put unique content so that there is plenty of content for Google spiders to index. Cut and paste information such as -> Registrant Contact Information: Name: Roy XYZ Address 1: XYZ Address 2: XYZ City: XYZ State: XYZ Zip: XYZ Country: XYZ Phone: XYZ Email: XYZ@XYZ is extremely valuable since people are always Googling peoples names, certain addresses, phone numbers, emails, zip codes, states and cities. When a future employer, girlfriend etc. does a name search many of these sites will show historical data that was scraped from previous whois records which can be online forever. Third party sites, that scrape this info, get more traffic from these searches pushing them up the search engine for these particular searches i.e. "First Name+Last Name" The higher they are on the search engines the more people find them and it doesn't take long for the traffic levels of these sites to grow rapidly. Lets now say that Roy lets his dot tel expire because he no longer feels that he has chosen the right name for his investor relations company. What Roy fails to realize is that he is permanently tied to the name RoyInvestorRelations.tel regardless of whether he owns it or not. Say another owner registers that name and commits massive fraud and that this dot tel is published all over the newspapers. When people still search Roy's name, address or telephone number it will tie him to RoyInvestorRelations.tel. If people do a search of RoyInvestorRelations.tel it will also show him as the owner. There is never an explaination, in red, under the whois info saying that Roy no longer owns the domain only the date he originally registered it. Being in the investor relations industry under a different name, Roy will lose a lot of business since his name is tied to fraud by another investor relations company that has nothing to do with his practices. Additionally other sites may publish his name as the current owner because they find the old Whois information online even though it has been updated since. Roy has no control of sites that post historical information but his days of owning a business in the field are numbered because of issues surrounding whois. :eek: |
I feel that Dot Tel is an extremely powerful domain name that has the potential to change the way people access information through the internet. That being said, I strongly feel the whois info must be blocked to protect the future development of the domain and businesses/people that use it to brand themselves. The issues I brought up in this post are only two of many future whois issues that could ruin the reputation of this domain name. |
If you feel strongly about this then you really need to raise it with ICANN No other gTLD offers the level of privacy in WHOIS (not to be confused with WHOIS privacy) that .tel offers at no extra cost. |
I agree that Telnic's Dot Tel does a better job than most other domain names however I believe that Telnic's Dot Tel has the most to lose with the whois being visible. I have notified ICANN on many occasions as many other people have. I think it is up to everyone to raise the privacy issues with ICANN as I know it will only be a matter of time before they are forced to change these settings. In the meantime however damage is being done as these third party sites scour the internet on a daily basis for whois information. This this information will be available to the public forever. I'm hoping that it doesn't create a black shadow over Dot Tel since the privacy issue is a touchy subject associated with the application of dot tel presents itself to some people as a problem. In reality it is the whois info they should be more concerned about. I work with many clients and when I buy a domain I intend to buy it to fully protect their brands/names. The current whois system is outdated, used by many devious people, and needs to be corrected immediately. After all, every domain name purchased comes with a whois lottery ticket for problems that can arise in the future. Once robots collect the information you can be assured it will be publish online forever since their primary reason for collecting it is to get people looking for your information to come to their site. |
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Yes this issue has already been discussed but the outcome is not what many of us expect. Owner of .tel should be able to activate the whois privacy option. I know there are some domains which has similar policy of not allowing the whois privacy option. Hopefully telnic get this sorted and allow the domain owners to have the whois privacy option just like all other well known extensions do.[/size] |
Telnic can actually hide all whois information without violating ICANN policy by implementing a whois privacy proxy. For example, do a whois on my personal website, ryan-goldstein.com, and you'll see that none of my personal information is listed there, not even my name; it's being protected by DreamHost's whois privacy proxy. The ICANN policy simply requires that registration information is correct for domain owners, NOT that it is publicly accessible. This is a FREE service for everyone hosting their domains at DreamHost, and from what I understand, many other registrars/hosts offer similar services. |
Good one there Rgolds i would support your thought. |
