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Comment by tscs37 | Hacker News Reader

In germany there is an imprint requirement so you'll always have a contact point for these things.

Unlike WHOIS it's on a website so you can protect this information much more easily from scraping and spamming.

That's where WHOIS protection comes in handy. If you don't want to get even more spam (the imprint has to be clear text, no obfuscation so gets spammed a lot) but a website that could target Germans (or you're in Germany), you'll quickly get costly letters from specialised lawyers. Having Whois protection usually helps, they tend to give up if they can't get your address easily.

Some minor Obfuscation should be okay "mail at example dot com" => "mail@example.com" and similar.

Plus I'm fairly certain providing temporary mail addresses (with decent lifetime) would also be okay.

Specialised Lawyer isn't quite right, a business that competes with you needs to file a complaint (IIRC from law course).

No, minor obfuscation is not ok. The same as a picture can be a problem for blind people, your example can be an issue for people not speaking english (it's a German law). I wouldn't take any risks with these laws.

My sites are all dual-language so I don't see that as a problem.

Not all domains have public websites.

If those create any abuse then you can still contact the registrar.

From what I understand the eventual plan for WHOIS to only allow access if there is truly legitimate interest. Everything else can be filtered over the registrar.

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