[ppml] Privacy Legislation and new proposals affecting residential privacy

[Anne Lord]

Hi Gregory,

It may be of interest to others to know that at the last APNIC meeting a 
proposal 'Privacy of customer assignment records'  was approved. The full 
details of the proposal, all discussions, minutes and presentations can be 
found at this URL.

http://www.apnic.net/docs/policy/proposals/prop-007-v001.html

The policy will not be implemented until the end of September. For anyone 
interested, there will be a project implementation update at the next APNIC 
meeting (next week) which will be available by webcast and live 
transcripts. See:

http://www.apnic.net/meetings/18/

for more details.

Regards,

Anne
APNIC Secretariat



At 01:08 AM 25/08/2004 +0200, Gregory Massel wrote:
>Hello PPML
>
>In discussions of the privacy of residential customer information, please
>consider that the reach of this extends beyond ARIN itself.
>
>Various countries have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, privacy
>legislation.
>
>Eg. In South Africa (which presently falls within the ARIN service region),
>the chapter 2 of the constitution entrenches every person's rights to
>privacy. To further entrench individual's privacy rights beyond this general
>provision the Law Commission has been drafting privacy legislation that will
>protect personal information. It is quite likely that in the future it will
>be illegal for South African ISPs to publish residential customers' names
>and address information in the whois database.
>
>Although not strictly an issue for ARIN, it may be worth taking into
>consideration legislative requirements outside of the ARIN region as these
>demonstrate the result of extensive international consultation regarding
>policies of this nature.
>
>In particular, I draw your attention to the case of the EU region:
>http://europa.eu.int/information_society/topics/ecomm/all_about/todays_framework/privacy_protection/index_en.htm
>
>In particular, "Article 12 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications
>Directive therefore grants subscribers of all forms of electronic
>communication services (fixed or mobile telephony, e-mail) the right to
>decide for themselves whether they want to be in a public directory."
>
>The threats posed to individuals whose privacy is not entrenched are
>extensive.
>
>I have heard arguments that this could be used as a means of safeguarding
>spammers and fraudsters, however, I urge you to consider the most basic
>legal principle of "Innocent until proven guilty." It seems extremely
>drastic to have to compromise the privacy of the innocent in order to make
>the process of tracing the guilty simpler. It also seems drastic that even
>the name and residential address of a spammer/fraudster be made public
>before that person has been prosecuted lawfully and afforded the dignity of
>defending the charges against him/her and a fair trial in which he/she is
>judged and found guilty.
>
>One might also want to consider the risks of backlash from organisations
>such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation that  campaign for online privacy
>should policies be amended to require the publishing of residential customer
>information.
>
>Regards
>Gregory Massel