Site is using Google Maps to show where YOU live from your whois info

Serious privacy invasion and safety threat

[Marcia]

This outfit has direct access to whois information from registrar databases, and is publishing a "wiki" on one of their websites with whois information, including names, addresses and email addresses, with a live Google map showing how to get to where you and I live, if our whois is public and not private.

At least regular people have to sign in at registars, generally with a captcha, to see whois information, with no doubt IP numbers logged. Not so here, it's just all out there for anyone to see, to scrape - or whatever.

Of course, its a sign of "lack of quality" according to some, to have private registration, which would avoid this kind of indiscriminate disclosure, and I seriously resent this blatant publicizing of personal information, ostensibly facilitating invasive contact by anyone with internet access, regardless of their intent.

[zCat]

Alexa was doing something similar, a while back, IIRC, though they made a bit of a botch and assigned domain names to the wrong people.

The "address" gained from whois is mostly pretty useless as a "locator" for a website; apart from the privacy issues this kind of service doesn't add any real value to the web.

[stu2]

I object to having a link to this site in the whois of all my eNom registered domains. I think it does add something, where the domain gets reviewed. I put in negative reviews to all advertisers on the site :)

[Marcia]

They are also showing lists of some "associated domains" some of which have no connection whatsoever, and might not even have been heard of by the site owners.

I've never heard of an automated "wiki" being pumped out of databases before, and I think we can guarantee that if they didn't have internal access they would not be looking up each domain individually.

IMHO, it's a downright honeypot for linkpop and PageRank and is no better than scraper spam - if not worse.

[gpmgroup]

If you edit the address section and remove the : from the front of each line this will leave the address but remove the Google Map links.

Not ideal, especially if you have several domains, but it removes the "ease of use"

[Essex_boy]

Several years ago I did have problems with this sort of thing form an unhappy customer I now list at a mail box with a computer autommated answering service.

Never again