Do you have to give up your privacy to be found on the Internet? Not if you use a .TEL name.                          

Being found and protecting your maintaining your privacy used to be mutually exclusive. Now with the .TEL domain name it is possible to have your contact information in the public domain while maintaining full control of it.

Once you’ve registered your .TEL name, you’ll be able to configure and manage the information through the TelHosting interface.  It is possible to publish your contact details in a secure way and decide the level of privacy that you need.

Start by adding some contact information. For example:

• Work Website
• Work Telephone
• Cell Phone
• Work E-mail Address
• Home Telephone
• Gmail Address
• MSN Instant Message ID

You can then create security groups to which users may be added. For example:

• Coworkers
• Business Associates
• Friends
• Family

From there, it’s simply a question of mapping contact information to security groups to determine who can see what information.

In this case, the only thing that a member of the general public could see is your work website address.

How “Friending” words

To have access to some or all of your contact details, someone would have to send a “Friending” request. This is a request that includes their name, email address and a short message. You can manage your friending requests through the TelHosting interface and assign each requestor to the appropriate group. If you don’t know the friending requestor, simply decline the request.

Encryption

All private contact records (held as NAPTR records in the DNS) are encrypted with 1024 bit encryption, so unless you explicitly allow someone to see a record through the security groups you create and the friending requests you allow, there’s no way for them to see your information.

Public/Private Key Encryption

The friending process is built on a popular and well used security model based on public and private “key” pairs. When you allow someone you’ve ‘friended’ to see secured information, the system encrypts the data using their public key. No one other than the recipient can unlock the data, but when the recipient receives the information, they can unlock it using their private key.

This is all managed transparently by the TelHosting software so it’s not something you need to be knowledgeable about in order to use it.