NI Domaintools whois history legal???

[goofart]

Does anyone know what gives Nameintelligence.com the right to make available private past whois history without the owner's permission?

Isn't this basically selling private information because in order to access this information you need to pay for a silver membership?

I recently paid for private registration service in in order to secure my personal info, however realized that my real information is now permanently available to anyone who has a domaintools membership even though my original whois was only up for 1 day before I was able to purchase the private registration service.

Is there a way to get domaintools to remove my personal whois? I checked their faq and their "solution" was:

"Unfortunately, no. Historical information is never deleted. Name Intelligence is a digital librarian, we consider deleting history the same as burning books."

I feel extremely upset over this - it makes the money I spent on whois protection useless and an infringement on my privacy!

 

[IAmAllanShore]

Interesting, goofart (I can't take you seriously with that name, btw ).
Move to Legal Issues.
-Allan :gl:

 

[labrocca]

Since when is whois private information?

 

[Dave_Z]

Does anyone know what gives Nameintelligence.com the right to make available private past whois history without the owner's permission?

Name Intelligence formed agreements and "ways" to pull up and keep WHOIS
records from the various players in the domain name registration business. But
those agreements are between them and those other parties.

The minute you sign up with NI, you are bound to their terms. You don't like it,
then cancel.

You're going to have to sue to force them to remove the info. But even that's
no guarantee you'll get what you want.

 

[RJ]

I feel extremely upset over this - it makes the money I spent on whois protection useless and an infringement on my privacy!

Interesting quesiton you bring up. You did publish your WHOIS information publically at one time... even though it was only for 1 day, you can't undo the past. But then again, would everyone therefore be allowed to compile and resell a database of people's names addresses and phone numbers? That is a scary thought.

I'm divided on this one. I respect the privacy issue, but have also found whois history to be useful in identifying scammers and stolen domains.

RJ

 

[thebutler]

Who is was public correct?

Unfortunately since the Whois information was PUBLIC for one day I'm pretty sure you are out of luck. The information was public its been stored and therefore its an accurate record.

Plenty of PUBLIC information is stored everday by various means. Big Brother exists but its mostly Big Business driving information technology so they can make more money. In this case Domaintools is making the money with their paid service for information that was PUBLIC.

Purchasing the whois privacy after the fact won't change the fact that the info was public. Sorry about.

 

[Shorty]

When I first read this thread, the first idea that jumped into my head was negligence of the company providing the whois privacy. However, I realised that they only protect the current and future whois data, not it's history, which is basically impossible when the data is in the hands of another party.

This is indeed a sticky issue, but technically, since you are now protected, they dont know that the old history they see is still correct. If it's changed hands since then, they wont know.

Lesson learned: If you're going to get private registration, do it at the time you register, otherwise it's rather pointless.

 

[DeluxeNames.com]

Not completely wasted. Many are not domain savey enough to know to join DomainTools for "whois history". Domain privacy therefore gives you protection for anyone that now looks up you whois info outside of DomainTools.

All Domain Privacy services that I know of have provisions in their TOS that will release your whois info if they are contacted by a lawyer with a legal dispute concerning your domain. Therefore, if someone wants your whois info bad enough, they will just hire a lawyer to make up a legal reason to require your whois and they will get it anyway.