Re: [ga] Privacy and Whois databases

[Eva Frölich <eva@nic-se.se>]

I can just refer to the situation in my country - Sweden. I represent 
NIC-SE, the registry of the TLD .se. NIC-SE is a company based in Sweden 
and therefore needs to fulfill the laws established in Sweden.  Sweden is a 
member of EU and within EU there are  different socalled directives about 
dataprotection and protection for private persons. Sweden are forced to 
implement these directives due to the membership. There is especially one 
about protections of individuals that causes a lot of trouble all over 
Europe because if its rigidity.

The fact though is, that we as a swedish company, has to follow the 
protection laws in Sweden and they don´t allow us to make everything 
public. Though there are other (older) laws which regulates what 
information about a company is public or not. The main question then (for 
me) is not for companies but for private persons holding domainnames. On 
top of that there are several domainname holders asking us to keep their 
data secret, not publicly available (both companies(!) and individuals).

As the protection laws are different around the globe, we have different 
views on this. And all the registries though, has to follow the laws in the 
country where they are situated.


/ Eva



At 11:32 1999-10-15 -0700, Karl Auerbach wrote:

> > What does the rest of the DNSO think?
>
>At the first IFWP meeting there was a lot of support, in fact, I would
>characterize it as "overwhelming consensus", that whois data be protected
>per the European privacy guidelines.
>
>As for the whois database and the US government, we ought not to forget
>that there is this thing called 5 USC 552a, the Privacy Act of 1974, which
>seems to have been conveniently overlooked.
>
>                 --karl--
>





_______________________________________________________________________
Eva Frölich
e-mail:	eva@nic-se.se
NIC-SE, Box 5774, 114 87 Stockholm

http://www.nic-se.se