WHOIS: As seen by its board of directors Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) failed to get an exception from GDPR for the WHOIS tool. WHOIS is a huge database of who owns domain names.
Although ICANN reportedly filed a treatment (last week) requiring domain registrars to collect data GDPR is now in effect in the European Union and until the case is heard 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 or contact information of the owner of a domain name will appear in WHOIS search results. This change makes the use of ID Protect unnecessary. Thus, the service ID Protect 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.
Thus, the services of concealment of these data by registrars are no longer meaningful. Please be reminded that anonymity services were additionally charged.
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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