New Privacy Options at CIRA

CIRA is responsible for managing the .ca domain. To comply with Canadian privacy laws they now offer the option to keep the adminstrative and technical contacts for a domain registration private. This is intended to be used by individuals rather than business domains.

Business can also select the option to keep their information private but should not. For two reasons:

• Domain-based certificate verification cannot be performed. When obtaining certificates for Web servers and such, the cheapest certificates used for SSL are those performed by domain verification. These certificates are approved by sending an e-mail to the administrative contact for a domain. When privacy is selected at CIRA, these providers cannot view the Administrative contact and consequently cannot send the verification request.
• Other contact is also not possible. There may be legitimate reasons why someone would want to contacts you, such as notifying you of misconfiguration in your DNS domain. This is also not easily possible.

It should be noted that Businesses have no right to privacy under Canadian law. The right to privacy applies only to private individuals.