Hi All,
I know some people are en route, and others leave soon. Safe
travels!
For a little more light reading, I want to draw your attention to
four documents shared by Bill Smith after the last meeting. These
are four submissions of the Article 29 Working Party, one is an
official opinion, and the other are three letters from then-Article
29 WP Chair Peter Schaar, Germany's powerful data protection
commissioner, to ICANN's then-chair Vint Cerf. Bill is truly a
researcher extraordinaire to find these documents!
(Quick Note: the Article 29 Working Party is created by the EU
Privacy Directive for all EU national data protection
commissioners.)
Below are a few snippets of the documents' very interesting
discussions.... and full docs attached for the rest! Enjoy, Kathy
Four documents, 2003-2007
1) "Opinion 2/2003 on the application of the data protection
principles to the Whois directories" -
"The Working Party encourages ICANN and the Whois community to look
at privacy enhancing ways to run the Whois directories in a way that
serves its original purpose whilst protecting the rights of
individuals. It should in any case be possible for individuals to
register domain names without their personal details appearing on a
publicly available register."
2) Schaar to Cerf, 6/22/06 - "The Article 29 WP is witnessing the
growing importance of the WHOIS
discussions as more and more individuals are registering their own
domain names and in
this connection there have been complaints about improper use of the
WHOIS data in
several countries."
3) Schaar to Cerf, 3/12/07 - Referencing the Operational Point of
Contact (OPOC) proposal -
"The Article 29 WP welcomes that the GNSO Whois Task Force has
adopted a definition for
the purpose of WHOIS as a basis for its work. As pointed out in
previous submissions, such a
purpose definition is a central element in determining whether a
specific processing or use of
personal data is in accordance with EU data protection legislation.
The definition given in the
report reads:
“The purpose of the gTLD Whois service is to provide information
sufficient to contact a
responsible party for a particular gTLD domain name who can resolve,
or reliably pass on
data to a party who can resolve, issues related to the configuration
of the records associated
with the domain name within a DNS nameserver."
"The Article 29 WP acknowledges the legitimacy of the purpose of the
making available of
some personal data through the WHOIS services, when this publication
is necessary for the
technical functioning of the Internet network as set out in the
purpose definition. This
publicity is necessary in order to put the person running a Website
in a position to face the
legal and technical responsibilities which are inherent to the
running of such a site. However,
in its current form the database does not take account of the data
protection and privacy rights
of those identifiable persons who are named as the contacts for
domain names and
organizations."
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