Re: [ga] scammers using whois privacy
I also respect someone's right to privacy and believe that there are valid reasons for whois information to be private/anonymous in many cases (particularly personal sites, political opinion sites, etc.) In the case of commerce sites, however, I get a mental picture of someone going to a 'seedy' part of a city and going into a dark storefront with no name of the business to be found over the door. To me that is as frightening online as it would be offline. Personally I experienced a situation with a popular/well-known site that I went to which ironically had all kinds of large notices all over the site warning people to not try to defraud them and how they checked each transaction thoroughly before completing it. Since the site was popular, without thinking a lot, I made a purchase there. In their zealousness to prevent themselves from being defrauded, there was at least a 12 hour delay in their 'checking' and at about this time I became concerned so did a whois lookup thinking I might contact them. Their whois information was anonymous and there was 'no' contact information for them on their website at all! The transaction was in this case finally completed but I have chosen not to do business with them again entirely based on the anonymous whois. I also check whois now before making any online transaction and have simply personally boycotted commerce sites that do not wish me to know who I am doing business with. The logic escapes me 'why' someone would want to hide their company/business contact information particularly if they're a legitimate business. -Dena Whitebirch http://quasar.net On Fri, 29 Dec 2006, kidsearch wrote: I love advocating for privacy, however if you have a domain name and you are on the public Internet, the whois info should be public in my opinion.
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