Dena and all,
Legitimate online and offline businesses are often threatened by clients
for many reasons, some of those reasons are false claims which the
business cannot and should not afford to be forced or coerced to
deal with. Hence why especially small online businesses do not
want their personal information listed in a whois for their domain
name or domain names.
Dena Whitebirch wrote:
Chris,
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.
Regards,
--
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 134k members/stakeholders strong!)
"Obedience of the law is the greatest freedom" -
Abraham Lincoln
"Credit should go with the performance of duty and not with what is
very often the accident of glory" - Theodore Roosevelt
"If the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B;
liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by
P: i.e., whether B is less than PL."
United States v. Carroll Towing (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947]
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