The .tel sunrise just started!
The blogosphere is quite awash with comments, as was to be expected. Some are quite thoughtful, others somewhat off-base so I suppose I have to remind people that:
Privacy is fully supported: choose who sees what. Spammers will need to break 1024-bit encryption...
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
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3 comments:
Henri,
The issue about spam isn't about private info stored in .tel. I expect that to protected. But the value of .tel seems to me to be in allowing *public* access to contact information. However, if I put my contact info out into the *public* DNS system, there is nothing stopping *anyone* from harvesting that information out of DNS and then spamming me via email or phone.
I wrote about this a bit in my .tel review today over on my Disruptive Telephony blog.
THAT is the spam issue I worry about - and that is what pretty much killed all interest in public ENUM (which had a similar premise).
Regards,
Dan
Hello Dan,
maybe I can explain the way the .tel works a bit better:
.tel makes you, the owner of your .tel, fully in control. It's up to you to choose how you want to use your .tel.
You can make some info public (your work number for example) and some other private for your friends (email) and significant other (email and cell phone).
As for spam, conceptually if your email address is out there somewhere and Google has seen it, it will be spammed. Period. I've had my email addresses out publicly on my henri.tel for months now with absolutely no change in the level of spam I'm receiving, since they've been public for a long time anyway.
That said, the best way to manage your .tel is to have your really private email address be actually private and only visible to (some of) your friends, and conversely grab a very good spam-resistant email address (such as gmail) as a public-facing email address. Best of all worlds.
The philosophy of .tel can be summed up in 2 words:
simplicity and freedom.
completely agree with Rik, the fact is, that if you were not to put an e-mail address in anything you post on-line, but use a .tel instead; You would have far much more control over how you wish to receive e-mail.
Also it avoids provider tie in as you can switch google/yahoo/hotmail, public/private etc. without affecting who can contact you. It would add a layer of control that you do not currently have without the complexity of managing many accounts.
One account being spammed? - drop it, open another!
On a personal information note, I think a .tel domain gives me control over the information I decide to share. Ask yourself how much personal information has google got on you, stored, copied, shared? I guess a lot more than a lot of people would probably wish.
A good example of this was a friend of mine who contacted the CEO of a very large company to speak directly to him regarding a potential deal. When he asked "where did you get this number?" he revealed that he had found it on the CEO's classic car club profile. It was the personal number he put on for other members to contact him regarding an event.
If he had added, to his .tel all of the members of the car club (via simple integration which we will see happening) then only the members he wanted would see his details.
We all understand social networking, this is simply an added tool to help us control what we do. Plus permission marketing (the antidote to spam) requires you to have a control mechanism - which a .tel domain absolutely is.
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