Domain Privacy

Why You Need Private Domain Registration

When you purchase a domain, your registrar is required by ICANN to enter the contact information of the site owner. Some kind of information must be submitted. So unless you opt to protect your personal data, it goes public.

Privacy protection hides personal contact information from complete strangers. This is pretty straightforward and is one of the most common reasons domain owners opt for privacy protection.

Almost everyone has the ability to access the internet, meaning that almost anyone could potentially have access to your mailing address, phone number, and email address. If a website includes debatable or hotly-contested topics, it can be an especially safe move to make personal contact details difficult to obtain to help avoid undesired contact from strangers.

Here are four reasons you should considering paying for private domain registration.

1. Protect Your Personal Data

Identity theft continues to be a common problem, and every 2 seconds there is a new victim. We go to great lengths to protect our privacy when it comes to banking, phone numbers, and even the information we share on social media. The same precaution should be taken with domain registration information.

There is enough data contained in a WHOIS domain record for a skilled or tenacious thief to start causing problems, and enable them to dig deeper into your personal data for the purpose of identity theft. Using domain protection covers your tracks with the info of your proxy service.

2. Stop Unwanted Solicitations

Listing personal contact information for your domain is an open invitation from telemarketers, sales people, spammers, and con artists. There are countless services that scrape WHOIS data for contact information, specifically from recently registered websites.

It doesn’t take long after a domain registration to start getting a flood of calls and emails about SEO services, content optimization, social media marketing, mailing services, virtual assistants, freelance opportunities from people overseas, and more.

What’s worse, there are scammers who may contact you when your domain is nearing expiration, with “renewal services” that actually do nothing to renew the domain, or that transfer it without your knowledge, and can cost the owner hundreds of dollars in bogus “services.” Be wary of any items received in the mail regarding your domain, and always contact your current registrar before responding to such solicitations.

3. Protect Your Email Address

When you use private domain registration, your registrar typically creates an alias or unique email address that is used in place of your own within the WHOIS database. This email address does not remain constant and will be updated fairly often. This is done to keep away unsolicited email from spammers.

4. Prevent Domain Hijacking

Domain hijacking used to be a much larger issue. Thanks to domain transfers being locked by default by most registrars after acquisition, it’s not as easy as it used to be. With this lock set, no one is able to transfer your domain away from you unless they somehow manage to get access to your domain registrar account and email.

Hiding your personal information adds one more hurdle to the process, making it extremely difficult for someone to harvest the data and attempt to gain access to your account.

While privacy protection is enabled, the domain transfer authorization email will be sent to the dummy email address listed rather than the registrant’s email address, making the transfer fail if not authorized. Most (if not all) dummy email addresses provided by registrars do NOT forward to the registrant’s email address.