GDPR Regulations Cause Sites Used by Police to Shut Down – WhoIs is One of Them

Many of us in the genealogy business, whether producing simple blogs & newsletters, or giant database operations, have been jumping through hoops the last few weeks in an attempt to comply with the new GDPR regulations of the E.U. For myself, it was actually kind of fun putting into (more) words what I was already doing. My Privacy statement grew by leaps during the last month. Now we’ve been alerted to another service (which I’ve used many times) to shut down. Following is a teaser from an article posted at the BBC.com May 29, 2018:

Whois, which is used by the police and journalists to check the legitimacy of websites, no longer displays the name, email address or phone number of some websites.

Icann, the owner of Whois had asked for a delay to comply with GDPR.

The request was turned down.

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal entitled, The EU’s gift to Cybercriminals, lawyers Brian Finch and Steven Farmer claim: “Police will be robbed of ready access to vital data drastically impeding their efforts to identify and shut down illicit activity.”

Read the full article at the BBC website.

Thanks to Dick Eastman for the heads-up. He’s written extensively about the GDPR regulations. Click here to read his blogs on the subject.

About Leland Meitzler

Leland K. Meitzler founded Heritage Quest in 1985, and has worked as Managing Editor of both Heritage Quest Magazine and The Genealogical Helper. He currently operates Family Roots Publishing Company (www.FamilyRootsPublishing.com), writes daily at GenealogyBlog.com, writes the weekly Genealogy Newsline, conducts the annual Salt Lake Christmas Tour to the Family History Library, and speaks nationally, having given over 2000 lectures since 1983.

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