5 ms·

I actually agree with Facebook on this one, domain owners should have legal personalities. That said, it shouldn't necessarily include their email, phone and a

by cynusx 6y ago

I actually agree with Facebook on this one, domain owners should have legal personalities. That said, it shouldn't necessarily include their email, phone and address. Just the legal owner name (company or person) would be sufficient.

tasogare 6y ago
Why that? To ease political persecution maybe? The system is good as is.
- cynusx 6y ago
  Well, it's a two-edged sword. If you happen to live in a part of the world where freedom of speech is actively persecuted then I agree it's better the way it is. However, if you live in a world where democracy and due process is well established and you are not intent on doing illegal things then it can only help law enforcement and private citizens/organizations to seek justice under those laws.
  - underdeserver 6y ago
    Law enforcement can reach out to the registrar with a warrant. The whole idea of having personal details in domain WHOIS information is a design from a different age. It does not work in the internet of 2020.
    - realusername 6y ago
      That's exactly my thoughts, if the DNS system was designed today, it would probably be decentralized, automated & anonymous, whois information comes from another era.
  - CaptArmchair 6y ago
    > democracy and due process is well established Democracy and due process are only well established to the extent that the values that underpin them are supported and taken to heart by the people. These values aren't self evident on a collective level. Social-economic, political, ecological, technological, cultural climates are either favourable or make upholding them rather difficult. > you are not intent on doing illegal things This is the exact crux of the matter. What is legal or illegal is subject to change and hinges entirely on who's in power. > it can only help law enforcement You could be happily giving up your personal data to authorities in a stable, peaceful context where law enforcement policies are genuinely geared towards protecting individual civilians and upholding basic human rights. It's far harder to retract that when context shift and that same data is used to actively enforce policies that pull away from those same human rights. A functional representative democracy consists of a separation of judicial, executive and legal branches consisting of elected mandates that can and should be held accountable at all times. Justice implies that any and all citizens are treated equally and impartial within the confines of that system. Facebook feeling that they aren't treated equally because they can't enforce their trademark? That's entirely valid. But those feelings don't justify a demand that society should compromise on fundamental principles of judicial or legal equality or impartiality in order to enable Facebook to crack down on trademark infringement at their own discretion (not to mention the blatant violation of privacy attached to that). All in all, the main difference between Facebook and a small time forum administrator is scale. Facebook has 70 billion dollars a year in revenue whereas the latter my earn pennies on Google ads. The size of that revenue can never be an argument to compromise on basic human rights for billions or change how legal systems favour particular private actors because they pushed for relentless economic growth on their own accord. Of course, while it's obviously hard to enforce such principles in all cases, the trouble with adding exceptions is that they gradually erode those same principles and values until they become meaningless. There's a reason why Lady Justice wears a blindfold, after all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice
  - darkarmani 6y ago
    > then it can only help law enforcement and private citizens/organizations to seek justice under those laws. In what way is law enforcement prevented from seeking justice in this case? Private citizens need to use the legal system to get that data, but that prevents all of those nefarious actors from getting your information without due process. Like you said, due process is well established, so why would you want to do away with due process?
    - cynusx 6y ago
      well, warrants work when you have sufficient evidence but what if you need to perform network-analysis to build sufficient evidence. Case in point is usage of stolen identity: Criminals probably already use identity theft to buy those domains, but given that the data is obscured by default it would be hard for police organizations to track systemic use of stolen identities. The ability to detect newly registered domains from known stolen identities would enable 1/ automatic blocking/warning in browsers 2/ Organizations like FB can gain valuable time in sending takedown requests of phishing sites 3/ establish enough evidence of use of stolen identities to get the warrants to obtain more information from the registrars/hosts like IP's used to connect... Just something I came up with brainstorming, I am sure there's more value to it
      - darkarmani 6y ago
        > but what if you need to perform network-analysis to build sufficient evidence. In that case you need to do it another way. There are a tremendous number of things we could do if law enforcement wasn't "hindered." It's along the lines of "argument from lack of imagination" to state that they HAVE to have access to that data to prevent x, y, z. I don't doubt that it would be useful to have that data, but that doesn't override privacy concerns. You already know the IP address of the server using that domain -- follow up that chain of responsibility.
fxtentacle 6y ago
If the article is correct in that Facebook is requesting this data for domains that look alike to Facebook and/or do Phishing, then I very much believe they should receive the data necessary to go to court. Just because Facebook is highly unsympathetic, doesn't mean that all their initiatives are evil. And shady websides hiding behind third party privacy providers to avoid legal responsibility for their illegal content is sadly something that I've had to deal with myself in the past.
- justinclift 6y ago
  The clear examples given of FB repeatedly trying to gain the personal owner details of non-shady websites, purely in order to sue them... that's ok with you?
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    This might be an unpopular opinion, but it’s ok with me. I don’t find restricting discovery needed to allow the filing of lawsuits to be something beneficial for society. There’s a real reason corporations need to have registered agents, mostly so they can be contacted (including to be sued) via a reliable process. I don’t see why a domain owner should be entitled to avoid official contact via privacy policies. I’m fine if there’s a reasonable policy to access it (including a possible workaround of an agent willing to accept official contacts). That someone would use the information purely in order to sue someone is a desirable feature, not a bug.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      > That someone would use the information purely in order to sue someone is a desirable feature, not a bug. The only problem with this is that your legal system is fucked so the winner is always that big corp. Have fun being sued to hell and bankrupt after a corp decides to go after your website criticising them. Have you even looked at the list of domains they are going after? > And then it has a whole section for “domains that use the full trademark [but] nevertheless evince an indication that the domain is or will be used to discuss grievances with the company in question.” Every one of them comes from Facebook: addictedtofacebook.org, banned-by-facebook.com, divestfacebook.com, facebooksucks.org, protestfacebook.org, saynotoinstagram.com. And there are legal processes to sue someone as others have explained. Facebook wants to avoid them. Also did people forget - https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-arrested-journalist-harassment https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-a...
raxxorrax 6y ago
They have for most registrars, although many act as a delegate and you need to contact them for personal contact information. It should be noted that the mail address you enter there will get a lot of spam. Quite a lot...
- Santosh83 6y ago
  I have my main email in the whois records for my website and I haven't noticed any increase of spam before and after. Perhaps the level of spam is proportionate to the popularity/traffic of your site?
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    You are lucky. Years ago, I made a mistake of buying domain on GoDaddy and my inbox was full of spam everyday. There was lot of questionable spam and I ended up deleting the email address.
    - DangitBobby 6y ago
      I bought a domain on GoDaddy a while back and the very next day I started getting robocalls and spam emails when I had been getting basically none before. They hold your personal info hostage; either pay extra or we expose this info to a legion of scrapers.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    Hm, it certainly doesn't have to do with popularity. My domain has a single visitor and he looks suspiciously like me. I use it as a test server for all kinds of general software vandalism. It does get visits from bots though, perhaps my registrar has "helped" me by registering it at search services. Pretty certain that I am linked nowhere.
    - Santosh83 6y ago
      I noticed that too: bot traffic even though (at that time) my site was linked or mentioned nowhere on the www. I guess the search companies crawl the WHOIS records for new domain names and send their bots over, even if your site is nothing but a blank placeholder page. :-)
enriquto 6y ago
"Legal name" policies are randomly discriminatory and thus not fair in principle. Some people have unique names, others have a name that is shared among thousands of people. Imposing a real name policy is a great burden on the former, but it does not really matter to the latter.
- cynusx 6y ago
  That's a fair point but usually that is solved by disclosing an additional datapoint like the date of birth of the person.
  - techdragon 6y ago
    Despite the implications to people who understand the relevance for data matching purposes.... the majority of people in my experience don’t actually care about sharing their birthday. Even without the year it’s a powerful de-anonymising datapoint.
    - cynusx 6y ago
      Yes, exactly. it's sufficiently identifying to solve the discriminatory treatment the parent pointed out
      - enriquto 6y ago
        Well, my intended conclusion was to reject "real name" policies altogether... But I agree that if you enforce the publication (not only the storage) of the birth date along the real name, then the discriminatory problem mostly disappears.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        It looks to me like that you've chosen to solve the problem by harming everyone equally, rather than dealing with the root of the issue.
belorn 6y ago
Many cctld require a legal person that is located in the country. In practice this mean a lot of domain names are written in the name of local lawyer firm that becomes the local presence.
- cynusx 6y ago
  I find this a bit backward actually but I suppose it exists to be able to serve legal notices to those domains. There's a lot of issues when you operate across jurisdictions that probably won't be solved until some international treaty comes along.
searchableguy 6y ago
No, they shouldn't if you don't want web to be censored and tranny of few people. Whois shouldn't exist publicly at all in the first place. Do you really want big corps to send some goons at your home to harass you for putting up a bigcorpsucks.com ? example: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-arrested-journalist-harassment https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-a...

by cynusx 6y ago

tasogare 6y ago

Why that? To ease political persecution maybe? The system is good as is.

cynusx 6y ago
Well, it's a two-edged sword. If you happen to live in a part of the world where freedom of speech is actively persecuted then I agree it's better the way it is. However, if you live in a world where democracy and due process is well established and you are not intent on doing illegal things then it can only help law enforcement and private citizens/organizations to seek justice under those laws.
- underdeserver 6y ago
  Law enforcement can reach out to the registrar with a warrant. The whole idea of having personal details in domain WHOIS information is a design from a different age. It does not work in the internet of 2020.
  - realusername 6y ago
    That's exactly my thoughts, if the DNS system was designed today, it would probably be decentralized, automated & anonymous, whois information comes from another era.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  > democracy and due process is well established Democracy and due process are only well established to the extent that the values that underpin them are supported and taken to heart by the people. These values aren't self evident on a collective level. Social-economic, political, ecological, technological, cultural climates are either favourable or make upholding them rather difficult. > you are not intent on doing illegal things This is the exact crux of the matter. What is legal or illegal is subject to change and hinges entirely on who's in power. > it can only help law enforcement You could be happily giving up your personal data to authorities in a stable, peaceful context where law enforcement policies are genuinely geared towards protecting individual civilians and upholding basic human rights. It's far harder to retract that when context shift and that same data is used to actively enforce policies that pull away from those same human rights. A functional representative democracy consists of a separation of judicial, executive and legal branches consisting of elected mandates that can and should be held accountable at all times. Justice implies that any and all citizens are treated equally and impartial within the confines of that system. Facebook feeling that they aren't treated equally because they can't enforce their trademark? That's entirely valid. But those feelings don't justify a demand that society should compromise on fundamental principles of judicial or legal equality or impartiality in order to enable Facebook to crack down on trademark infringement at their own discretion (not to mention the blatant violation of privacy attached to that). All in all, the main difference between Facebook and a small time forum administrator is scale. Facebook has 70 billion dollars a year in revenue whereas the latter my earn pennies on Google ads. The size of that revenue can never be an argument to compromise on basic human rights for billions or change how legal systems favour particular private actors because they pushed for relentless economic growth on their own accord. Of course, while it's obviously hard to enforce such principles in all cases, the trouble with adding exceptions is that they gradually erode those same principles and values until they become meaningless. There's a reason why Lady Justice wears a blindfold, after all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice
- darkarmani 6y ago
  > then it can only help law enforcement and private citizens/organizations to seek justice under those laws. In what way is law enforcement prevented from seeking justice in this case? Private citizens need to use the legal system to get that data, but that prevents all of those nefarious actors from getting your information without due process. Like you said, due process is well established, so why would you want to do away with due process?
  - cynusx 6y ago
    well, warrants work when you have sufficient evidence but what if you need to perform network-analysis to build sufficient evidence. Case in point is usage of stolen identity: Criminals probably already use identity theft to buy those domains, but given that the data is obscured by default it would be hard for police organizations to track systemic use of stolen identities. The ability to detect newly registered domains from known stolen identities would enable 1/ automatic blocking/warning in browsers 2/ Organizations like FB can gain valuable time in sending takedown requests of phishing sites 3/ establish enough evidence of use of stolen identities to get the warrants to obtain more information from the registrars/hosts like IP's used to connect... Just something I came up with brainstorming, I am sure there's more value to it
    - darkarmani 6y ago
      > but what if you need to perform network-analysis to build sufficient evidence. In that case you need to do it another way. There are a tremendous number of things we could do if law enforcement wasn't "hindered." It's along the lines of "argument from lack of imagination" to state that they HAVE to have access to that data to prevent x, y, z. I don't doubt that it would be useful to have that data, but that doesn't override privacy concerns. You already know the IP address of the server using that domain -- follow up that chain of responsibility.

fxtentacle 6y ago

If the article is correct in that Facebook is requesting this data for domains that look alike to Facebook and/or do Phishing, then I very much believe they should receive the data necessary to go to court. Just because Facebook is highly unsympathetic, doesn't mean that all their initiatives are evil. And shady websides hiding behind third party privacy providers to avoid legal responsibility for their illegal content is sadly something that I've had to deal with myself in the past.

justinclift 6y ago
The clear examples given of FB repeatedly trying to gain the personal owner details of non-shady websites, purely in order to sue them... that's ok with you?
- sokoloff 6y ago
  This might be an unpopular opinion, but it’s ok with me. I don’t find restricting discovery needed to allow the filing of lawsuits to be something beneficial for society. There’s a real reason corporations need to have registered agents, mostly so they can be contacted (including to be sued) via a reliable process. I don’t see why a domain owner should be entitled to avoid official contact via privacy policies. I’m fine if there’s a reasonable policy to access it (including a possible workaround of an agent willing to accept official contacts). That someone would use the information purely in order to sue someone is a desirable feature, not a bug.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    > That someone would use the information purely in order to sue someone is a desirable feature, not a bug. The only problem with this is that your legal system is fucked so the winner is always that big corp. Have fun being sued to hell and bankrupt after a corp decides to go after your website criticising them. Have you even looked at the list of domains they are going after? > And then it has a whole section for “domains that use the full trademark [but] nevertheless evince an indication that the domain is or will be used to discuss grievances with the company in question.” Every one of them comes from Facebook: addictedtofacebook.org, banned-by-facebook.com, divestfacebook.com, facebooksucks.org, protestfacebook.org, saynotoinstagram.com. And there are legal processes to sue someone as others have explained. Facebook wants to avoid them. Also did people forget - https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-arrested-journalist-harassment https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-a...

raxxorrax 6y ago

They have for most registrars, although many act as a delegate and you need to contact them for personal contact information. It should be noted that the mail address you enter there will get a lot of spam. Quite a lot...

Santosh83 6y ago
I have my main email in the whois records for my website and I haven't noticed any increase of spam before and after. Perhaps the level of spam is proportionate to the popularity/traffic of your site?
- searchableguy 6y ago
  You are lucky. Years ago, I made a mistake of buying domain on GoDaddy and my inbox was full of spam everyday. There was lot of questionable spam and I ended up deleting the email address.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    I bought a domain on GoDaddy a while back and the very next day I started getting robocalls and spam emails when I had been getting basically none before. They hold your personal info hostage; either pay extra or we expose this info to a legion of scrapers.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Hm, it certainly doesn't have to do with popularity. My domain has a single visitor and he looks suspiciously like me. I use it as a test server for all kinds of general software vandalism. It does get visits from bots though, perhaps my registrar has "helped" me by registering it at search services. Pretty certain that I am linked nowhere.
  - Santosh83 6y ago
    I noticed that too: bot traffic even though (at that time) my site was linked or mentioned nowhere on the www. I guess the search companies crawl the WHOIS records for new domain names and send their bots over, even if your site is nothing but a blank placeholder page. :-)

enriquto 6y ago

"Legal name" policies are randomly discriminatory and thus not fair in principle. Some people have unique names, others have a name that is shared among thousands of people. Imposing a real name policy is a great burden on the former, but it does not really matter to the latter.

cynusx 6y ago
That's a fair point but usually that is solved by disclosing an additional datapoint like the date of birth of the person.
- techdragon 6y ago
  Despite the implications to people who understand the relevance for data matching purposes.... the majority of people in my experience don’t actually care about sharing their birthday. Even without the year it’s a powerful de-anonymising datapoint.
  - cynusx 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. it's sufficiently identifying to solve the discriminatory treatment the parent pointed out
    - enriquto 6y ago
      Well, my intended conclusion was to reject "real name" policies altogether... But I agree that if you enforce the publication (not only the storage) of the birth date along the real name, then the discriminatory problem mostly disappears.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      It looks to me like that you've chosen to solve the problem by harming everyone equally, rather than dealing with the root of the issue.

belorn 6y ago

Many cctld require a legal person that is located in the country. In practice this mean a lot of domain names are written in the name of local lawyer firm that becomes the local presence.

cynusx 6y ago
I find this a bit backward actually but I suppose it exists to be able to serve legal notices to those domains. There's a lot of issues when you operate across jurisdictions that probably won't be solved until some international treaty comes along.

searchableguy 6y ago

No, they shouldn't if you don't want web to be censored and tranny of few people. Whois shouldn't exist publicly at all in the first place. Do you really want big corps to send some goons at your home to harass you for putting up a bigcorpsucks.com ? example: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-arrested-journalist-harassment https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-a...