[arin-ppml] WhoWas Service Now in ARIN Online Announcement

[paul vixie]

On 3/29/2012 3:53 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> On Mar 28, 2012, at 1:27 PM, admin at directcolocation.com wrote:
>> I do agree that it is not a bad thing but I do not see how it is a fair
>> approach for a new service being applied to the whois at this date
>> forward, if you were in the business of LAW then it would appear that it
>> was a law that was being implemented and now would effect you on anything
>> you have done in the past vrs now that you know making sure that you
>> govern yourself accordingly.
> I completely disagree.

i almost completely disagree but i do see some small merit in the
concerns that have been expressed.

> Nothing being published by ARIN today is anything that ARIN did not
> publish in the past. In the past anyone could have archived what was
> published and so there is no new exposure from ARIN making it
> available today.

when data is available in the aggregate it has different privacy
considerations than when it's available only in focus. to see this work
in the real world, witness the difference in how people feel about
having their picture taken if they know it's going up on the web with
full tagging and facial recognition. or how people feel about a picture
of their front yard appearing somewhere on the web, vs. having it on
google street view.

public but unindexed and unaggregated information just does not have the
same relationship to "reasonable expectation of privacy" that indexed
and tagged and aggregated information does.

that having been said... whowas has in my view societal benefits that
outweigh its societal costs. noone who has an exclusive right to any
internet resource has any reasonable expectation of privacy as to their
relationship to that resource, nor the history of that resource's prior
exclusive rights holders.

paul