Domain Name Privacy & ID Protect

Before the advent of GDPR, the contact details of all domains were available to anyone doing a WHOIS search on the internet. Since GDPR, most of this information has now been obfuscated. With the UK having left the EU, it is not clear whether any contact information will be made public again or not.

You can check if your contact information is being made public by going to...

• https://www.nominet.uk/whois/ for UK domains
• https://community.jisc.ac.uk/janet-apps/whois for gov.uk domains
• https://lookup.icann.org/ for most international domains

If your contact details are being made public and you would like to hide them, these are the possibilities...

If you have registered a UK domain and you are not using your domain for business, you can apply to have your personal details kept out of the public's eyes, but if you are a business, you are obliged to have your registration details made public. For this reason, if for example you are working from home, you may want to consider using a PO Box address. If you would like to have your contact details hidden, please open a support ticket via the client area.

For some international domains, there is another solution, ID Protect. This will effectively cloak your details and replace them with the ID protect information. This service cost £12.50 per year and is only available for the following domains' extensions: com, net, org, biz, info and tv.

ID Protect provides proxy information instead of your personal contact information. Parties who want to contact you use the proxy information, and the messages are forwarded to you.

The domain name WHOIS database is a principal source of email addresses for spammers. If your domain name has ID Protect, the contact email address used by ID protect for your domain is changed several times a year. Spammers harvest and use one WHOIS email address, but once it is changed, that source of spam is cut off.