[ppml] Nasty business with 2003-3

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

There is a policy proposal that, on the face of it, is about improving the 
privacy of residential customers. It allows an ISP to remove a customer's 
name and street address from a whois entry. But it says nothing about zip 
codes. And that is the root of the problem...

Here are some references that show how a Zip+4 code or a Postal Code can 
be used to narrow down the physical location of a person to a small enough 
area to make it easy to stalk someone or burn down their house in the 
middle of the night.

USA
http://www.usps.com/zip4/zipfaq.htm
http://www.usps.com/history/history/his3_5.htm

Canada
http://www.infinitegravity.ca/postalcodeformat.htm
http://www.canadapost.ca/personal/tools/pg/preparation/mpp6-02-e.asp

Now the board of trustees did note this as an issue and referred the 
policy proposal back to the AC. But the AC did not address the privacy 
issue at all. They simply bounced it back to the BoT with a note that they 
had "discussed" the issue.

This is a flawed policy proposal. It claims to improve residential privacy 
and yet it does not remove all the data which identifies the residential 
user.

--Michael Dillon