If you've had your domain for your website for any length of time, you may have been contacted by Domain Scammers who try to trick you into transferring your domain registration to them.
These spammers harvest your domain owner information from the whois contact details that are required by law to publicly show on your domain. By adding Whois Privacy Protection to your domain, you can protect your personal contact information and give yourself anonymity from prying unethical eyes.
How Does Whois Privacy Protection Work?
The ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) requires that when you register a domain name, you must have accurate information published in the whois data, for administrative and legal aspects.
Seeing your name, company name, and contact information on your domain may seem like a great idea, and on the surface it seems to actually be a great way to boost your internet presence.
However, many less-than-ethical companies skim this public information (your name, email, address, etc.) and use it for spamming, telemarketing, and more. As we have seen with displaying our email address on our websites, we are opening ourselves up to spamming and phishing schemes by giving them our name, address, phone number, etc. in our domain registration information.
Unfortunately, making our information publicly available on the internet, in this case, can leave us wide open for unethical scammers who try to trick us into renewing our domain through them, and typically at a very high renewal fee.
Adding privacy protection to your domain helps maintain privacy by hiding our contact information.
The email and address of the protection service shows up in place of your contact information which protects you from the public display. They display a confidential email for you which essentially masks your email from the outside world.
Why Would You Want Domain Privacy Protection?
A Private Whois service allows you to protect your personal information appearing on the WHOIS. Just as anti-spam software helps filter your emails, this stops spammers from skimming your contact information.
And don't worry - you are still the legal owner of your domain, you just have the added security of hiding your private contact information from prying spamming eyes. The protection service will filter out the obvious spammers and forward all real emails onto you.
Whois protection can typically be added to your domain registration as an optional service for a nominal fee. Most find this a small price to pay for added peace of mind.
Top comments (0)