<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> >Following recent discussions on this mailing list regarding personal data, the RIPE NCC would like to clarify a few points. I have a few questions to RIPE and the RIPE community: -The issue of whois access is not specific to an RIR so why isn't the issue elevated to the ASO so the policies are consistent across RIR's? -What requirements does the EU set for personal information where the owner has agreed to place the information in a publicly available database? Each discussion I have seen merely says personal information must be protected without any discussion as to whether permission was given to make the information available. -Why is the abuse contact fundamentally different than the other types of contacts as it relates to the protection of personal information? -Once RIPE reviewed the report from the task force was apparently a legal review completed. Is that review available to the public? -Why does task force report have little or no useful information about how the conclusions were reached? -Since these mailing lists and meetings are only a tiny fraction of Internet users what initiatives are there to solicit opinions of those being affected by the decisions? In this case spam, abuse, and access to the whois data is a universal issue and not limited within a region. there is a large gap between the task force report and the implementation of the AUP. Isn't this policy setting by the RIPE NCC? (such as setting a limit of a certain number of queries per day, disregarding the fact that some requests are "pass-through" and the IP they detect is not the actual IP address, definition of "bulk" access, etc.) -Since the current restriction do little or nothing to stop "harvesters" from collecting the information (since they use a distributed system of IP's) what is the purpose of IP address restrictions (other than cases of DOS attacks which is obvious)? -What exactly is "abuse of the information"? Is this defined anywhere? It seems to me that each person will have a different idea of what is "abuse" depending on their personal view of the world. Thank You </body> </html>