Why You Need Privacy Protection
When a domain name is registered, the whois of your domain name lists your personal information (such as Name, Company Name, Address, Telephone Number, Email Address) as Contact Details for that domain name as per regulatory requirements. This information becomes available to anyone who performs a whois lookup of your domain name.
Whois is an organization that manages all data regarding domain registration. All registrant details are considered public information, in addition to the nameservers and other simple details regarding domain registrations (e.g. registration, renewal, and expiry dates).
Your personal information is at risk from being manipulated by data miners, who can then target you via junk email, frank telephone calls, postal messages, fax messages, etc..
Depending on the domain name extension, different types of information is displayed to those conducting a lookup.
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.
Here are few reasons you should considering enabling for private protection.
1. Protect Your Personal Data
Identity theft continues to be a common problem so you should take precaution on your 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.