WHOIS: As shown by the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and NumbersICANN) failed to get a GDPR exemption for the WHOIS tool. WHOIS is a huge database data which states who owns the domain names.
Although ICANN claims to have filed a lawsuit (last week) requiring data collection from domain registrars, GDPR is now in place in the European Union, and until the case is judged, all companies still collecting WHOIS data are illegal.
So under the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), today we received an email from a domain registrar in Greece that explicitly states:
...no personal information or contact information of the owner of a domain name will appear in the results search WHOIS. This change makes the use of ID Protect unnecessary. So the ID Protect service is going to be phased out.
In the next time, auto-renewal of the ID Protect service will be disabled. No action is required from you, ID protect will be deactivated upon expiration and your data will continue to be automatically protected.
Let us be aware that WHOIS data collection practices were one of the gray areas of the law. The GDPR requires organizations to collect only as much data as is needed for a specific business purpose, and no more. So data that mentions the administrative and technical manager of an email is now prohibited from being freely published on the internet.
So are you services of hiding the specific data from the registrars are no longer meaningful. Please note that anonymization services were charged extra.
Due to uncertainty about what is going to happen, some European DNS registrars have decided not to collect WHOIS information anymore.
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