Data Protection

Data Protection

DENIC's whois information service can provide you with the necessary particulars about the holder of each .de domain as well as that domain's contacts. This data has to be made publicly available for several reasons. One evident reason is that it must be possible to contact domain holders if their domains as such or the use of them cause technical difficulties that might lead to disturbances for others.

These particulars also have to be publicly accessible in order to be able to establish whether, through registering the domain, its holder might perhaps have infringed the rights of others. In such cases, the crucial point is often whether or not the domain is derived from the holder's actual name.

DENIC's aim is to strike an equitable balance between the interests of domain holders and those of others who may be affected by technical and/or legal problems. Therefore, it only discloses the data that is strictly necessary for the purpose described or whose publication has been explicitly approved by the domain holder. This means in particular that as far as the domain holder and administrative contact are concerned, only their postal addresses are output, but not their telephone numbers or e-mail addresses, since it will not usually be necessary to contact them quickly or electronically. The situation is different for the technical contact and zone administrator, who must be available without delay in case of a technical emergency. In addition, these addresses are generally business and not private ones and hence do not require any particular protection.

Please note that, because of data privacy regulations, DENIC does not make any provision for so-called inverted searches. It is thus not possible to enter the names of particular domain holders and retrieve an output of all the domains they hold.

Publication of the domain data on the scale described above as the output from DENIC's whois information service has been carefully coordinated with the competent data-protection bodies. Two informative sources for additional information are, for instance: