If you’re required to publish your customer information while complying with privacy laws, the WHOIS Privacy Protection Service can help.
ICANN guidelines require registrars to make information public. By default, when a customer registers a domain, their personal information, such as an email address and phone number, should be publicly available.
The only way ICANN allows a registrar to “redact” Whois registrant information is in the EEA, where customers are protected by GDPR. We believe this is not a complete privacy solution. And here’s why:
First, many registrants are located outside the EEA and want to keep their Whois information private from public disclosure. Even though they may have country laws that they believe protect them from having their information published. As a registrar, you can choose to extend redaction to all domains where it’s allowed. However, the use of redaction alone does not protect your customers from “onward sharing” required by other third parties, such as registries.
With WHOIS Privacy Protection Service, your customer information stays with you.
Registries often require registrars to share your customer’s Whois for each domain registered. With redaction alone, your customer’s information is still required to be shared with these registries. This means that your customers will need to check each registered top-level domain to understand each registry’s privacy policies and guidelines.
In addition, many privacy/proxy services may require a registrar to provide them with your customer’s personal information. This means that even if you use a privacy/proxy service and avoid “onward sharing” with registries, your customers’ personal information may still be shared because they need it. Your customers will again have to review another set of privacy policies and guidelines.
We believe this is neither privacy friendly nor necessary.
With WHOIS Privacy Protection Service, you get it all. Your customers’ information is not made public. There’s no “onward sharing” because your customer’s personal information is not given to us.
We don’t ask for it, and we don’t need it.
