Whois Sunset & Privacy

From the Captain Obvious Department: Internet has changed since Al Gore invented it.

ICAAN, the international body governing the top level domain policies, is meeting tomorrow to decide the faith of the whois system, originally designed to help organizations identify domain name ownership / identity. However, as the Internet has grown beyond its legitimate residents of pornography and students (ehm, researchers) seeking the said pornography, many criminals have found the whois system to be an excellent source of b2b spam data. Imagine the freely accessible, global database of domain names matched to the identity of the IT person in charge of it – why, you could SPAM them to death, you could send them fake domain renewal requests, you could build your own database, the possibilities for evil are endless.

Over the past few years few registrars have found a way to make money off this problem by offering “Private” registrations. Now it seems ICAAN is looking to put an end to it completely, a timely decision benefiting nobody.

If you would like privacy online you might want to think of a good fake name. Vlad Mazek is taken. Just use your fake name and you’ll be set.

Here is the problem though, or at least the start of the problem, for the privacy conscious – you’ve seen nothing yet! If you think the ability to match the organization with the contact IT person is a skill you might as well move to Afghanistan an start digging a hole because if you’ve ever lived, worked, Googled or had your picture taken (or been in a public place) your anonymity is soon to be gone. That is at least where we’re going folks.

Just what do you think this whole “Web 2.0” thing is? A giant party for heterosexual-yet-inactive-but-not-by-choice residents of San Francisco? Not entirely. The “Web 2.0” and its full embrace is about replacing the traditional content of the Internet as it was in the 90’s when it was dominated by people that had something of value to say (researchers) or something of value to show (porn). But now that everyone with the keyboard is a researcher and everyone with the webcam is a porn star the Internet is elevating a little bit. “Web 2.0” is about identifying relationships.

Internet of 1999 can be summed up by two web sites – www.youtube.com and www.wikipedia.com. One is a continuous stream of crap to share with the people you barely know, the other is a loosely reliable knowledge database. And Web 2.0 is changing that. Web 2.0 is changing the Internet as we knew it and making it about connecting more than 90’s version was about linking. In plainer terms, Web 2.0 drags you to the person you want, introduces you and reads you their bio. The old Internet gives you their old business card.

That is only where the fun begins. The old privacy concerns used to be finding out where you lived and what your phone number was. Todays privacy concern is that everything you say, do, participate or enjoy becomes an immediate and accessible public property. And all the world is your neighborhood. Networks like Twitter allow people to publish their entire life, which they personally open up, to anyone that might be watching. listening and reading. You don’t even have to be a willing participant, if you’ve taken a picture with someone that uploaded it to their social network and then “tagged” you, that data is up there.

And the Web 2.0 is all about personalizing and connecting this world wide web of information that is just sitting out there, waiting to be put together…. and abused. See why people fear Google?