Privacy is the right of everyone,therefore everyone should sign this petition to establish restrictions and fines for those intruding upon your Private data!! http://www.americansdeserveprivacy.com I just signed! (Hey it cant hurt trying right?)
There's a lot of FUD on that page. "Any predator who wants to manipulate you for whatever reason will know your name, address, email address, phone and fax number." Thousands of people already know this information about me. None of them have the ability to "manipulate" me. "Easy access to your personal information by stalkers, harassers, and worse." This information might be personal but it is not private. You have no expectation that people not know your name. It is also not all that difficult to find all of that information already. Your address and phone number are not difficult to find in a phone book based on your name. Email addresses are often able to be found with a Google search for a person's name. If you want to keep your name from being involved in your website then start an offshore company and have it buy the domain name for you. "If you have a family or personal Web site, predators now know exactly where you or your family resides." Even if you don't have a "family or personal website" they still know where you live. Unless you don't tell them. The requirements for registering a domain name don't say that you must live at the address. They simply say that you must be contactable at that address. You can put your work address down if you want as long as mail sent there will reach you. "Identity theft con-artists will know all your personal information and how to contact you to steal your credit card numbers." No they won't. They will know a couple of bits of information, none of which are particularly private. They will not know your credit card details. If somebody wants to steal your identity or even simply commit identity fraud they will need to know a lot more information than what is contained in a whois record. "Spammers and phishers will have easy access to your email address. You can be sure you'll hear from them. " You don't have a "spam" account and decent spam filtering yet ? Do you seriously have an email account that doesn't already get inundated with spam ? "If you post pictures of your children on your website, paedophiles will know what they look like." (Paraphrased) Well duh. This has nothing to do with the issue they are talking about. They just wanted to put "Think of the children !" in there. It is very easy to let your emotions rule your decisions but the fact is that this "privacy" does little to nothing to protect you from physical violence. There are real things you can do to protect yourself (and I'm not talking about sleeping with a loaded shotgun) but they are dictated by rigorous study and reason, not emotions. I'm not in favour of this new rule. It serves no useful purpose and does make life slightly more difficult for people who want to disassociate their names from their websites. However, I am not in favour of this particular website either, even though it opposes the new rule. You do no one any favours by invoking "Think of the children !" on an issue that has nothing to do with children. Tell us the facts without any of the hyperbole and your message will speak for itself. There are plenty of good reasons to oppose this new rule but sadly none of them are contained on this website.