411 and DNS: A Global SPAMbase?

Tired of managing a bazillion phone numbers and email addresses? Try storing them in DNS.

This December, new .tel domains will let individuals store all of their contact information within DNS. With a single location, presumably getting in contact with someone will be as easy as a hitting your closest search engine.

And it’s not just phone numbers or email addresses that can be stored. While regular DNS entries only store rudimentary contact information, the .tel domains will be able to hold five kinds of information.

• Contact information will contain telephone numbers, IM and email addresses and  personal keywords for describing oneself.
• Links can be embedded to any website, such as one’s LinkedIn profile or corporate website.
• Digital identities used across games, SecondLife and other online services, can be stored .tel domains..
• Support for geolocation information will let users store their mailing addresses.
• Finally, indexable text can include any of the above information as well as a user’s own custom messages.

Protecting all of this will be two levels of security. Users will be able to designate data as  public or private. To view private data, users will need to request access or “friending”” as Telnic calls this process. Users can also designate which private data should be exposed to a given “friend.”

All of which sounds great, but there are two things bothering me. Today, most of us already have some kind of personal web site, Facebook or Linked In profile with our contact information. Do we really need yet another way for folk to find us?

What’s more based on Telnic is saying about the “friending” process it doesn’t look like there’s any sort of digital certificates or identity checking going on. So the friend that you’re sharing your personal contact details may be just another spammer.