Your Personal Information Could Be Made Public When You Start Your Own Website
After reflecting on the money I made from my e-business experiments in 2007, I’ve decided to make a push on generating advertising revenue from content-driven websites. As such, I’ve decided to start some new websites. Coming up with the perfect website name took some time, as well as some online tools. But, once you find an available domain name that you like, you have to make sure you protect your privacy when you register the domain name.
ICANN, the international governing body for domain names, requires that the contact information for your domain name is posted in a publicly accessible “WHOIS” database displaying the contact name, address, and telephone number for the administrative contact (that’s you.) Because you have to supply accurate information when you register a domain name and because the information is publicly available, it opens you up to spam, identify theft and just a general invasion of privacy.
Domain registration companies are starting to offer privacy options where, instead of publishing your contact information in the WHOIS database, they publish information about their company. Blue Host explains the following:
The whois information for any domain name is available to anyone on the internet. Your whois information can be harvested by marketing companies, which will give you unwanted solicitations. When you add Bluehost Privacy to your registration, the only information listed in the whois will be Bluehost. Here is an example of what the whois might look like for your domain.
Without Bluehost Privacy
Registrant:
John Smith
123 Your Street
Your City, Your State 12345
United StatesWith Bluehost Privacy
Registered through: BlueHost.com
Domain Name: yourdomain.com
Created on: 15-Nov-02
Expires on: 15-Nov-05
Last Updated on: 31-Oct-04
Wikipedia, however, remind us that the “privacy” offered by various companies differs greatly.
Domain privacy is a service offered by a number of domain name registrars. A user buys privacy from the company, who in turn replaces the user’s info in the whois with the info of a proxy service such as Domains by Proxy or Whois Privacy Protection Service.
However, this is not true anonymity. Personal information is collected by these registrars to provide the service. To some, registrars like Domains by Proxy take little persuasion to release so-called ‘private’ information to the world, requiring only a phone request or cease and desist letter.
Others, however, treat privacy more seriously, and host domain names offshore, even using e-gold or money orders in transactions so that the registrar has no knowledge of the personal information about the domain name owner in the first place (which would otherwise be transmitted along with credit card transactions).
Currently, the Internet Coalition for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN broadly requires that the mailing address, phone number and e-mail address be made publicly available through the “Whois” directories. That policy enables spammers, direct marketers, identity thieves, or other attackers to loot the directory for personal information about domain name owners.
SOURCE: Domain Privacy, wikipedia.
The amount charged for privacy varies greatly. As of March 2005, all owners of .us domains will not have the option of keeping their information private. Canadian (.ca) domain names can be made private, however, the amount charged varies greatly between companies. For example, Domain.ca charges $19.95 for 1 year for a .ca registration, while Internic.ca charges a hefty $50 per year.
In the end, we chose Bluehost.com. Although they don’t offer Canadian .ca domains, they do sell .com domains at $10. The privacy option is free. We compared that with godaddy.com, which charges $9.99 and an extra $6.99 for the privacy option. (It’s a one time fee to get privacy on your domain names, and if you buy 5 or more domains, the privacy option is free.) Still, I’d rather go with Blue Host and save my money.
To tell you the truth. We ended up signing up with Blue Host ($6.95 per month) and getting our domain name (and privacy domain option) for free. So far our experience with Blue Host has been incredible. It provides us with the privacy we want for our domain name registration. And… when we registered our domain name, our site space was instantly available online. (We had to wait 2 days for it to be activated with our original host, webserve.ca, although that might have been because it was a Canadian domain name.) Tomorrow, we’ll tell you about everything we love about Blue Host so far…
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January 14th, 2008 at 3:00 am
domain privacy is indeed an option to combat spamming. However, there are people that do perform a whois check on a particular domain before purchasing from the website, these group of people tends to feel more comfortable to conduct ecommerce activities in a website when they can obtain a real address and valid contact info in the domain whois record instead of a private proxy.
January 16th, 2008 at 12:54 am
I absolutely agree that as a consumer, I feel much better when I know that an ecommerce site is legit - either because I’ve spoken with a real-life person, the brand has a brick-and-mortar presence, or, because a whois check reveals a contact name and address on the domain.
But someone who is just starting and hanging a shingle out on the internet likely hasn’t incorporated and is operating out of their home, so the domain name registration gets the personal 411. While the private proxy isn’t foolproof, it’s an additional step towards reducing your risk of spam and identity theft.
But you’re probably right. I would wonder why an ecommerce site didn’t publish their information on whois.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:14 am
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