I actually agree with Facebook on this one, domain owners should have legal personalities.
That said, it shouldn't necessarily include their email, phone and address. Just the legal owner name (company or person) would be sufficient.
That said, it shouldn't necessarily include their email, phone and address. Just the legal owner name (company or person) would be sufficient.
Just because Facebook is highly unsympathetic, doesn't mean that all their initiatives are evil.
And shady websides hiding behind third party privacy providers to avoid legal responsibility for their illegal content is sadly something that I've had to deal with myself in the past.
That someone would use the information purely in order to sue someone is a desirable feature, not a bug.
The only problem with this is that your legal system is fucked so the winner is always that big corp. Have fun being sued to hell and bankrupt after a corp decides to go after your website criticising them. Have you even looked at the list of domains they are going after?
> And then it has a whole section for “domains that use the full trademark [but] nevertheless evince an indication that the domain is or will be used to discuss grievances with the company in question.” Every one of them comes from Facebook: addictedtofacebook.org, banned-by-facebook.com, divestfacebook.com, facebooksucks.org, protestfacebook.org, saynotoinstagram.com.
And there are legal processes to sue someone as others have explained. Facebook wants to avoid them.
Also did people forget - https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-a...
Just by incorporating you take on resposibility of paying taxes, accounting, submitting regylar reports, etc. Presumably you will be selling something, and people need to have an address for recourse. That 'address' could be a PO box somewhere, or be in a tax heaven.
By contrast owning a domain does not obligate you to do anything in society, and doesnt affect anyone life.
Most people register a domain to have a custom email. Why should you have the right to deanonimise that?
If you are concerned about hatemail: you can send real post anonymously, with a postage stamp, though an unattented mailbox. I can even put somone else's return address on it.
The same way you put your email address in a mildly obfuscated format instead of jim@cimpress.com. You don't want anyone or anything that comes across your bio having access to your email address without human intervention, or at least a degree of intelligence.
> but it's ok with me.
We've already seen with the DMCA what happens when you give free-reign to companies in this area.
In particular, in the linked to lawsuit there's example sites that Facebook requested details for from Namecheap, and Namecheap chose not to give out the information. Many of them were 100% obvious phishing sites [0]. Clearly no option where the registrar gets to decide when to reveal information about the owner would work.
[0] E.g. facebo0k-login.com, facebokloginpage.site, faceboookmail.online
So if I ask the phone company to give me a log of all of your phone calls, you'd be fine with that? How else could i get that log of calls?
Hopefully, we can agree that it is private information we wouldn't want a company sharing or selling to other companies. The same principal is in play here. There is no reason a registrar should be compelled to release private customer information because someone demands it without following the legal process.
Whois shouldn't exist publicly at all in the first place.
Do you really want big corps to send some goons at your home to harass you for putting up a bigcorpsucks.com ?
example: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-a...
There's a lot of issues when you operate across jurisdictions that probably won't be solved until some international treaty comes along.
If you happen to live in a part of the world where freedom of speech is actively persecuted then I agree it's better the way it is. However, if you live in a world where democracy and due process is well established and you are not intent on doing illegal things then it can only help law enforcement and private citizens/organizations to seek justice under those laws.
The whole idea of having personal details in domain WHOIS information is a design from a different age. It does not work in the internet of 2020.
Democracy and due process are only well established to the extent that the values that underpin them are supported and taken to heart by the people.
These values aren't self evident on a collective level. Social-economic, political, ecological, technological, cultural climates are either favourable or make upholding them rather difficult.
> you are not intent on doing illegal things
This is the exact crux of the matter. What is legal or illegal is subject to change and hinges entirely on who's in power.
> it can only help law enforcement
You could be happily giving up your personal data to authorities in a stable, peaceful context where law enforcement policies are genuinely geared towards protecting individual civilians and upholding basic human rights.
It's far harder to retract that when context shift and that same data is used to actively enforce policies that pull away from those same human rights.
A functional representative democracy consists of a separation of judicial, executive and legal branches consisting of elected mandates that can and should be held accountable at all times. Justice implies that any and all citizens are treated equally and impartial within the confines of that system.
Facebook feeling that they aren't treated equally because they can't enforce their trademark? That's entirely valid. But those feelings don't justify a demand that society should compromise on fundamental principles of judicial or legal equality or impartiality in order to enable Facebook to crack down on trademark infringement at their own discretion (not to mention the blatant violation of privacy attached to that).
All in all, the main difference between Facebook and a small time forum administrator is scale. Facebook has 70 billion dollars a year in revenue whereas the latter my earn pennies on Google ads. The size of that revenue can never be an argument to compromise on basic human rights for billions or change how legal systems favour particular private actors because they pushed for relentless economic growth on their own accord.
Of course, while it's obviously hard to enforce such principles in all cases, the trouble with adding exceptions is that they gradually erode those same principles and values until they become meaningless.
There's a reason why Lady Justice wears a blindfold, after all.
In what way is law enforcement prevented from seeking justice in this case?
Private citizens need to use the legal system to get that data, but that prevents all of those nefarious actors from getting your information without due process.
Like you said, due process is well established, so why would you want to do away with due process?
Case in point is usage of stolen identity: Criminals probably already use identity theft to buy those domains, but given that the data is obscured by default it would be hard for police organizations to track systemic use of stolen identities.
The ability to detect newly registered domains from known stolen identities would enable
1/ automatic blocking/warning in browsers
2/ Organizations like FB can gain valuable time in sending takedown requests of phishing sites
3/ establish enough evidence of use of stolen identities to get the warrants to obtain more information from the registrars/hosts like IP's used to connect...
Just something I came up with brainstorming, I am sure there's more value to it
In that case you need to do it another way. There are a tremendous number of things we could do if law enforcement wasn't "hindered." It's along the lines of "argument from lack of imagination" to state that they HAVE to have access to that data to prevent x, y, z.
I don't doubt that it would be useful to have that data, but that doesn't override privacy concerns. You already know the IP address of the server using that domain -- follow up that chain of responsibility.