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Comment by adrianratnapala | Hacker News Reader

But at least in Germany (and perhaps other EU countries?) website owners are required to provide contact details on the website. That's not exactly the same as domains and WHOIS, but it is similar enough to show that the German state (rightly perhaps) doesn't actually care about this sort of privacy.

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It's only the DACH region to my knowledge and you can still do a lot to prevent spammers from getting the details.

That basically includes most of the default anti-scraping methods but since you only have one page to do it on, it's far simple to get 99% of the bad guys out (Spammers usually stop bothering once you get more advanced than ROT13 via Javascript or images designed to trip up OCR but still being readable)

Spam and scraping are not the problem, real people are. Getting a nutjob show up with a gun at your office because you are required by law to make your contact and address details public ain't fun, and not something that you can solve with ROT13 in Javascript.

Sorry, but how often does that happen?

Not often enough that I care tbh.

If somebody has legal beef with me, having a contact address to quickly resolve it is more important.

Besides that, you can always simply get legal with the registrar who will get them your address anyway (or escalate until you find somebody who knows who you are)

Nutjobs with guns showing up anywhere to shoot up people is rare in my country to the point that I worry more about the extra electricity consumed by transmitting my imprint.

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