Dear Customer,
As you all will have heard by now the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force from May 25th, 2018. There are some changes that will be made as a result of the regulations, particularly as it relates to contact information in the WHOIS, and in this email we will provide you with a summary of what those changes are and how they will affect you.
Your personal data will no longer show in the WHOIS for most domains
By default we will no longer disclose personal data to the domain registry or third party providers, if that registry will be displaying your data in the WHOIS. This means that even if you do not select WHOIS privacy, your personal data will not be visible in the WHOIS. We will also not disclose your personal data in our Public WHOIS, for the .com, .net and several other TLDs we maintain the Public WHOIS database.
We need your approval to disclose your personal information
You will need to "opt in" if you want your personal data to be displayed in the WHOIS. We are still working through the mechanisms of how this will be made available to you, but as the regulations are very strict it is likely that you will need to opt in on a contact by contact basis. The following data is considered not to be personal for the purposes of GDPR, all other data is personal:
• Organization, Street, City, State/Province, Postal Code, and Country in the case of organizations (if the "organization" field is filled out and no first, middle, last name is given)
• Country and State/Province in the case of private persons (P-handles, if no organization is given)
We will forward all emails sent to the "hidden" address to your specified email, similar to how our WHOIS privacy currently works. Some Registries may insist on the disclosure of your personal data, in these instances we will notify you in advance of registration and you will have the option to give your approval of this disclosure.
WHOIS Privacy services will remain the same
The Whois Privacy Service offered through WHOIS privacy corp will continue to be fully available after GDPR has become effective, although in nearly all cases WHOIS data will be private in any case.
The process for transferring domains may change, however we don’t yet know how
As part of the transfer for most domains an email is sent to the registrant contact by the gaining registrar requesting approval of the transfer. As we know that the ability to transfer domains easily is important for many of our customers we intend to "disclose" the email address of the registrant as part of the transfer procedure, allowing the transfer to be easily handled by the new registrar. However, it is not known how other Registrars will handle transfers and as such it may be more difficult to transfer your domain to Internet.bs. If ease of transfer is important to you we recommend that you transfer your domains to Internet.bs as soon as possible.
We will be updating our policies
We are currently rewriting our data handling policies and privacy policies to reflect the new requirements of the GDPR and will be notifying you as soon as these are available. We will also be updating our website with more information about how we handle your data and where it will be used so that it is clear to you what is happening with the information you give us. We also will be adjusting our database so that we no longer hold your personal information longer than it is needed.
The GDPR is coming into effect on May 25, 2018, it will ensure that private individuals have more control and information on how their personal data will be published and processed.
While compliance with the GDPR is challenging for all involved parties, it will ultimately help to protect private data of Internet users from abuse and misuse both by restricting processing and by improving security. Internet.bs will be fully compliant with the new regulations and is pleased that our partners and industry colleagues will soon match the outstanding data privacy measures that our customers already enjoy.
If you would like to find out more information about GDPR and its affect on the domain industry please read our "Eight minute expert guide to GDPR" available here. You can also contact our support team who will be able to assist with any enquiries.
