ICANN wants to stop private registration by proxy for small business owners

Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting that ICANN wants to stop “private” domain name registration by individual owners who show any possible commercial intent at all (like by allowing ads), as in this story by Jeremy Malcolm and Mitch Stoltz, link here. 

   

The ICANN proposal for Proxy Services Accreditation is here. 

  

Parties with legitimate need to find owners (to file legal actions) can still use discovery processes. 

  

However, some owners could be left open to harassment.

  

I use a UPS store address for business, which I don’t think would be affected.

 

My Census employment in 2010-2011 led to my getting a letter about the hacking "accident"

Since I worked for the Census Bureau in 2010 (diennial) and 2011 (one of the surveys), hourly, it looks like my PII got caught up in the Chinese hack. I got the dreaded form letter from OPM today.

Do I think it’s very likely anything would happen with it?  No, because of the “law of large numbers”. I don’t work there now and wasn’t in the loop for security clearances. 

But in late 2013, I kept getting emails asking me if I wanted to register my “doaskdotell” domain in China, even though it had been banned before.  That was rather odd.

 

Identity theft insurance; more on protecting elderly parents credit, and airline cards

Thursday, June 4, 2015 I did write a piece on homeowner’s and car insurance and social media on my Issue blog.

  

It’s well to add here that in many states, most homeowner’s and renter’s policies offer optional coverage for Identity Theft and fraud resulting from it. 

  

It might not work in estate situations where the property inherited belongs to a trust rather than to the beneficiary (typically, only events connected directed to the property are covered). It would have been intended to cover the original owner before her passing from identity theft.

  

Besides checking credit reports, it goes without saying that one of the best defenses to identity theft is simply frequently checking all financial accounts online.  This is probably more trouble to do for an elder relative in care than for one’s own affairs; the parent is likely to have accounts that one doesn’t know about.

   

Here’s another problem:  airlines seem to want to give consumers Visa or Mastercards when they sign up for frequent flier miles.  It seems like you get a new card when you book a reservation whether you applied or not.  Maybe the application is embedded in the website somehow. That also means another credit inquiry, possibly lowering a credit score.