Pascale Julienne, Pascal Julienne wrote:
In France there is such a thing as unlisted phone numbers which remain private and unknown. Further, the RIPE DB is becoming the best spam list in the world. So yes, responsability lays with LIR, yes let's clean the DB, yes respect privacy.
I think there are two sides to this issue. One is what the RIPE NCC can and has done to increase the privacy of people who have contact information in the Database. We have been trying to increase the privacy protections in the Database over time: - person/role objects removed from public FTP site - DB automatically rate limits access to person/role objects - mntner/irt objects removed from public FTP site - .DE person object deletion - automatic cleanup of unreferenced person/role objects The Allocation Editor on the LIR Portal should allow LIRs to keep their contact data up-to-date. We have talked with the Dutch Data Protection Authority about the Database as well, to make sure that we don't run afoul of the EU privacy directives. There has been some discussion at the last RIPE meeting about how the Database both aids and hinders spammers. Suggestions such as checking validity of contact information, as well as possibly putting fake entries in the Database and tracking spam they receive were mentioned. The second issue is deciding on what contact data *should* be in the Database. This is the job of the address-policy-wg, and perhaps the db-wg. A related issue is how the data should be accessed, which is also something that can be decided by the same groups. Katri Forsberg did a service by raising the issue. As a final issue, I am curious why you say the RIPE Database is becoming the best spam list in the world! I think that it probably generates a lot of spam for LIRs, because they have their contact information on many objects in the Database. I don't know any way to avoid this if the Database is public. I hope that for the end users who's information is in the Database for only a small number of addresses that they do not get much spam originating from the publication in the Database. The RIPE NCC is certainly interested in mechanisms that we can set up to prevent such use, as it is explicitly *not* allowed by the license that we provide for the Database. -- Shane Kerr RIPE NCC