GDPR 'risks making it harder to catch hackers'

Found on BBC News on Tuesday, 29 May 2018
Browse Internet

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.

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."

Research sure does not seem to be one of the strong points of Finch and Farmer, otherwise they would know that police still can get the information; it's just hidden for hobby investigators. They would also know that, for years, you could pay for privacy services so that your whois information was hidden; now that's just the default for everybody and actually a good result because SEO spammers won't harvest contacts anymore. Not to mention that stalkers and others have a much harder time to threaten the owners of fully legal websites. Sorry, but the "that supports terrorists" argument to remove privacy does not apply here.