Hi Ronald

Nice to read that you vigorously support parts of my policy proposal at least. 

On Thu, 23 Jun 2022, 10:39 Ronald F. Guilmette via db-wg, <db-wg@ripe.net> wrote:
In message <YrLp+ZTtuw+93KR/@jima.tpb.net>,
Niels Bakker <niels=dbwg@bakker.net> wrote:

>The current proposal is also a solution to people entering wrong
>information, as denis has clearly stated. Bad information in the
>database should be avoided, it's worse than no data.

Wow!  I confess that I didn'rt read sections 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0 of this
proposal (2022-01) till now.

This is REALLY astonishing!  For a proposal that is initially billed as
one for which the need "arises from the need for the RIPE Database to
avoid the publishing of unnecessary personal data" this proposal veers
quite dramatically and vastly off-course in sections 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0
as it attempts to contstruct a whole new and never-before-seen regime
to "verify" *all* WHOIS data... presumably for some value of "verify".

The policy proposal is about processing personal data. That easily covers verifying that entered data is correct. It does not cover verification of 'all' data. Only the clearly specified data. 


Who exactly is going to be tasked with verifying 100% of the names, email
addresses, phone numbers, and street addresses already present in the data
base and what procedures and criteria will be used for this process?  Will
NCC be tasked to do this huge amount of work?  Is there a a target completion
date?  2029 perhaps?

Not all these data elements are covered and not 100% of others either. As you pointed out, some of the data elements you mention above cannot be verified and that's why they are not covered. 


Even above and beyond the huge amount of work this proposal would create
for -somebody-, the practical challenges all seem to be left as an exercise
for the reader.

How exactly does one "verify" a voice phone number?

How exactly does one "verify" a mailing address?

How data can or should be verified is an implementation issue. This policy proposal is concerned with establishing principles.


As should already be apparent I am 100% in favor of *all* of this kind of
"verification", and indeed, I am very much looking forward to it all being
done.  But as noted above, there are a LOT of unanswered questions regarding
how, when, and by whom this will all be done.  And that is -before- we even
get into the question of what the plan is to -force- existing members... not
even to mention legacy holders... to have accurate WHOIS info if they just
don't much feel like it.  How can existing members be forced into this if
their existing contracts do not already require it?  And what will be the
penality imposed upon any member who refuses to go along?  Expulsion from
RIPE and/or termination of their membership??  That is sure to be wildly
popular among the membership... NOT!

This policy proposal, quite correctly, makes no mention of cancelling membership or de-registering any resources. Just as the abuse-c policy doesn't. It is about establishing the principles that will govern the way data is processed. Most RIPE policies don't define enforcement procedures. That is clearly outside the scope of defining principles. 

All members and contracted resources are already bound by agreements that require them to enter correct data into the database. 


None of these questions are answered by the proposal.  Again, all of these
questions are left as an exercise for the reader.  I don't see how this
propsal can fly, given that it fails to even try to answer any of the
obvious questions it raises.

Because that will be discussed along with any other implementation details. 


Furthermore, as I've said, sections  4.0, 5.0, and 6.0 of this proposal are
quite clearly entirely unrelated to the goal of *removing* personal data
from the data base.  So really, what we have here is two entirely unrelated
proposals... one for removal of some data and another for the verification
of other data... glued together to make them superficially appear to be
just a single proposal.

This policy proposal is not specifically about removal of personal data. In the abstract it says:

"This policy sets out the principles governing the publishing of personal data in the RIPE Database. These principles must be applied to all personal data published in the database by all data maintainers"



I'm frankly not sure that it is even worth further discussion of this proposal
until such time as it is broken into two propsals by its author... one for
removal of personal data from WHOIS, which I remain adamantly opposed to,
and a separate one for verification of WHOIS data, which I vigorously support.

As I said above, this policy proposal is about establishing the principles by which personal data is processed. If these principles are accepted there will need to be quite a discussion to follow on how to implement these principles and what type of migration plan will be needed. It is quite clear no one will flick a switch and all these changes will happen over night. It is also clear that a migration plan will need to include many steps allowing time for members to adapt and adjust. 

Cheers
denis 
Proposal author 



Regards,
rfg

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