FYI - Suspension of Cogent access to ARIN Whois

Tue Jan 7 09:13:26 UTC 2020

* David Guo via NANOG

> Good News! But we still received several spams from Cogent for our RIPE and APNIC ASNs.

If you are an EU/EEA citizen, you may object to their use of your personal information for marketing purposes (or for any purpose at all), as well as request erasure.

(Note: these rights do not extend to impersonal role addresses like noc at example.com or hostmaster at example.com.)

According to https://www.cogentco.com/en/cogent-gdpr/data-privacy, this should be done by sending e-mail to dataprivacy at cogentco.com.

There is no circumstance in which a company can legally refuse an objection to processing of personal information for marketing purposes. Therefore, should they refuse (or claim compliance but continue to spam you), you have standing to file a complaint with your national data protection agency.

A DPA is competent to levy fines for violations of the GDPR of up to €20M or 4% of annual global revenue, so there is a certain incentive to respect such objections.

(It might be that citizens of California have similar rights under the CCPA, which came into force last week.)

Tore