[anti-abuse-wg] personal data in the RIPE Database

In message <CAKvLzuG7PPTtQDwx2GoDgULdmLZdz5FzWTwa2pUVQWRqGHfQig at mail.gma
il.com>, denis walker <ripedenis at gmail.com> writes

>On Mon, 6 Jun 2022 at 16:15, Richard Clayton <richard at highwayman.com> wrote:

>> You appear to be under the impression that Internet security and safety
>> arises out of the activities of Law Enforcement Agencies whereas in
>> practice private individuals and companies do the vast majority of this
>> work -- generating referrals to LEAs when it is appropriate for action
>> to be taken that only they can perform

>We are talking about restricting access to one piece of data, the
>address of natural persons.

it's several lines of data ...

> I accept that a lot of abuse may come from
>address space held by natural people. I understand that a lot of
>investigation work is done by companies and individuals. How much of
>an impact would it be on your activities to not know the private
>address of these natural people? 

what matters is the matching of data, so that it becomes possible to
link otherwise disparate activity together -- and also to proactively
deal with the risk of further abuse

>From the country attribute in their
>ORGANISATION object (accurately maintained by the RIPE NCC) you know
>the country that they are legally operating from. You don't know the
>street or city they work out of. 

exactly -- now for bad people, this data is often inaccurate and
incomplete, but nevertheless patterns (and consistent inconsistencies!)
are often apparent

>I can only think of three reasons why
>you would need the full address. You intend to visit them (unlikely),
>you want to serve legal papers on them or you attempt some kind of
>heuristics with the free text search in the database to match up
>resources with the same address.

the last of these three is what matters -- the other two activities are
generally the purview of Law Enforcement and they will be working off
rather more information than WHOIS (correspondence with RIPE, payment
information etc).

-- 
richard                                                   Richard Clayton

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary 
Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 11 Nov 1755
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