[Rt4-whois] Data protection letters to ICANN

[Kathy Kleiman]

Hi All,
I know some people are en route, and others leave soon. Safe travels!

For a little more light reading, I want to draw your attention to four 
documents shared by Bill Smith after the last meeting. These are four 
submissions of the Article 29 Working Party, one is an official opinion, 
and the other are three letters from then-Article 29 WP Chair Peter 
Schaar, Germany's powerful data protection commissioner, to ICANN's 
then-chair Vint Cerf. Bill is truly a researcher extraordinaire to find 
these documents!

(Quick Note: the Article 29 Working Party is created by the EU Privacy 
Directive for all EU national data protection commissioners.)

Below are a few snippets of the documents' very interesting 
discussions.... and full docs attached for the rest! Enjoy, Kathy

_Four documents, 2003-2007_
1) "Opinion 2/2003 on the application of the data protection principles 
to the Whois directories" -
"The Working Party encourages ICANN and the Whois community to look at 
privacy enhancing ways to run the Whois directories in a way that serves 
its original purpose whilst protecting the rights of individuals. It 
should in any case be possible for individuals to register domain names 
without their personal details appearing on a publicly available register."

2) Schaar to Cerf, 6/22/06 - "The Article 29 WP is witnessing the 
growing importance of the WHOIS
discussions as more and more individuals are registering their own 
domain names and in
this connection there have been complaints about improper use of the 
WHOIS data in
several countries."

3) Schaar to Cerf, 3/12/07 - Referencing the Operational Point of 
Contact (OPOC) proposal -
"The Article 29 WP welcomes that the GNSO Whois Task Force has adopted a 
definition for
the purpose of WHOIS as a basis for its work. As pointed out in previous 
submissions, such a
purpose definition is a central element in determining whether a 
specific processing or use of
personal data is in accordance with EU data protection legislation. The 
definition given in the
report reads:

"The purpose of the gTLD Whois service is to provide information 
sufficient to contact a
responsible party for a particular gTLD domain name who can resolve, or 
reliably pass on
data to a party who can resolve, issues related to the configuration of 
the records associated
with the domain name within a DNS nameserver."

"The Article 29 WP acknowledges the legitimacy of the purpose of the 
making available of
some personal data through the WHOIS services, when this publication is 
necessary for the
technical functioning of the Internet network as set out in the purpose 
definition. This
publicity is necessary in order to put the person running a Website in a 
position to face the
legal and technical responsibilities which are inherent to the running 
of such a site. However,
in its current form the database does not take account of the data 
protection and privacy rights
of those identifiable persons who are named as the contacts for domain 
names and
organizations."

-- 



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