Privacy Protection

When you are registering domain name you are submitting (either manually or automatically) you private data such as your real name, home or office street address, phone number and email to your registrar.After that all those records become publicly available for everyone at the special WHOIS database. Try to search for your own or someone else's domain at whois.net and you will see how it's working. You can choose not to list your home or office phone number in the local Yellow Pages but according to ICANN (Internet domain names governing entity) rules you can't be not listed in WHOIS database as well as provide invalid or incomplete contact information. So the only way to protect your privacy is to substitute your contacts with someone else's but you can't do it by yourself without breaking the ICANN rules because your contacts should be valid. A vicious circle.

Fortunately, there is a way to hide your personal data from being discovered with the WHOIS services. This way (or better to say - option) is commonly called Privacy Protection or Private Registration. When you turning it on during domain name registration or any time after that all your contact data are being substituted automatically by the contacts of Private registration company.

If someone will perform WHOIS query on the protected domain name he will see email, phone number and street address of the privacy protection company. However, you will still retain full ownership over your domain. Domain transfer procedure is the only thing that's affected by such protection. If you (by any reason) want to transfer your protected domain to another registrar you will need to turn protection off before transfer.

Why you could need to hide your contact information? First of all, to hide your real email and phone number, because email spammers and telemarketers are searching WHOIS database regularly for new email addresses and phone numbers to spam. Also you could want to hide your name from the eyes of your competitors to prevent them from guessing what you are working on. And last but not least - you can just want to keep anonymity.