What is WHOIS and how does it impact me?
How do you feel about your personal contact information being available on the Internet? If you have ever registered a domain name to create a blog or launch a business, your personal information (including name, telephone number, email, and postal address) is already published in a database called “WHOIS”.
WHOIS is an old system, dating back to the dawn of the Internet, to allow systems administrators from universities and government offices to contact each other. Now that nearly everyone is online, WHOIS contains contact information for small businesses, churches, individuals, even minor children. Anyone – law enforcement, businesses, individuals, even spammers– has free access to the data in WHOIS. With so much sensitive information publicly available, governments, civic groups, and privacy advocates are starting to tackle WHOIS, who has access, how they use the data, and what it all means for online privacy.
While they wrestle with these issues of privacy, there are steps you can take right now to protect your personal information online. Privacy Services (sometimes called “Proxy Services”) post their own contact information in WHOIS in place of yours.
A recent study indicates that up to 20% of domains on the Internet trust these services to guard their information.
What is ICANN?
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the international governing body for the Domain Name System (DNS), and creates the rules for domain names that can be used to create new websites. They also manage the information collected in the WHOIS database.