Your Home Address is on the Internet

4 min readMay 8, 2016

If you own a .nz website domain, your home address and phone number are on the Internet.

Background

At the moment the Domain Name Commission (DNC) are reviewing .nz WHOIS. This sounds scary, but what this means is that they are reviewing what happens with the information you fill in when you buy a .nz website address (called a ‘domain’).

What happens at the moment?

When you buy a .nz domain, you’re asked for your name, home address, email address, and phone number. Most of the companies who sell you domains don’t tell you this, but this information is collected and published to something called the WHOIS directory.

The WHOIS directory is a publicly available directory. Anyone with Internet access can, for free, put in your website address and get your full name and your home address, email address, and phone number.

In addition to this, there are services who scrape (collect) any information added to the WHOIS directory and keep copies of it as soon as it is added. This means that once your information is added to the directory, it’s then stored in many places, which makes it very hard to remove. Some of these places will try to charge you money to remove your details.

Why is that a problem?

If it’s not a problem for you, you’re lucky! But, for lots of people, it’s a scary thing. Stalkers, harassers, and bullies can all access this information. Anyone, now or in the future, who decides to hold any form of grudge against you will be able to find where you live in about 30 seconds.

Here’s some people this is especially scary for:

Children (they own domains!)
Women
Domestic violence survivors
Rape survivors
People being bullied
Witnesses in court trials
Doctors, including psychiatrists owning independent practices

These are all people we very much want to be part of the Internet community. They are important voices and we should be working hard to ensure they have a safe way to participate.

It might not be scary for you now, but you don’t know what the future holds. There may be a time when you don’t want your home address on the Internet.

In addition to this, marketing companies harvest this information to send people spam.

How should it work?

Overseas registries, like in France and Canada, allow you to be private by default. This means that the people you buy your domain from collect your details and send them to the registry (the people who manage this all), but they don’t publish them.

If there’s a problem with your domain, the registry can contact you. And if law enforcement needs it, they can submit a legal request to find out your details, but they’re not just freely available to anyone.

What’s being proposed in New Zealand?

The DNC are proposing that only people who can provide evidence of threat (like a restraining order) should be able to hide their details.

For lots of people, that’s not an option. In fact, a restraining order can escalate domestic violence. In cases of online bullying, where there are multiple perpetrators, it’s not even an option.

This strategy is also too little, too late when those details are harvested and published in many locations. There’s very little point removing details that have been spread across the Internet without your consent or control. In theory, harvesting like this is against the terms and conditions, but in practice, it happens.

It also places the burden on people who are often already in a difficult position, both emotionally and financially, rather than protecting them.

How do we fix the situation in New Zealand?

We need more people to submit to the DNC to tell them that it’s important for these details to be private.

We think that all New Zealanders should be able to own a .nz domain without fear for their safety. We think that New Zealander’s privacy should be protected by default.

We think the burden should be placed on people who want to find more information. (Remember, they can already email someone using the proxy system). Usually these are companies who have financial resources and contacts, and who can seek court orders to unmask details. This prevents abuse of the system.

You don’t need to know about the technology behind it. What’s important is that the DNC hears about why it’s important to you that these details aren’t publicly listed. At the moment, they think it’s a niche issue that doesn’t matter to many people.

How do I submit?

You can read about the process here.

Then, send an email to policies@dnc.org.nz by 7 June 2016. If you want your submission to be anonymous, mention this in your email.

Encourage lots of other people to submit too. It doesn’t need to be a big submission, and you can copy parts of this page to help you.

You can read some other submissions here: