WithheldforPrivacy! What is it?

In order to shield you from potential spam and even identity theft, when you enable the Domain Privacy service for a domain, it makes the Withheldforprivacy.com protected information available to the public rather than your contact information.

How Is Domain Privacy Implemented?

Your personal email address will be changed to a special Withheldforprivacy.com one, and all emails sent to that address will be redirected to the one you provided as the Registrant.

You can also choose to plan a change in your Withheldforprivacy.com email address every few days in order to increase the privacy of your online presence. This should give you further defense against spam because mail gathered from Whois expires after a few days.

What Is WithheldforPrivacy?

• In essence, Withheld for Privacy is domain privacy. When you register a domain, you are required by ICANN to give registrars up-to-date personal information such as name and contact information, which is then required to be displayed publicly.
• While there is no official Whois directory, the public output that registrars must display acts as a vast address book for domains. Each Whois record contains details on the registrant (.e.g. you), registrar (e.g., Namecheap), name servers, expiry date, and so on. Your information includes your name, address, email, and phone number.
• This information is a vital resource if any issues should arise regarding your domain, such as from ownership confirmation. ICANN requires that it is shared publicly by default (unless you are protected by the GDPR, but more on this later).
• Sharing your registrant information publicly has many drawbacks. The largest is that anyone can find your information online and use it however they please, including to spam you.
• If you want to make sure your personal contact information is not made available to the public, you can use a domain privacy service. At Withheld for Privacy, your customer information stays with you.

How Does It Work?

Withheld for Privacy replaces real customer contact details, with our own, generated information. Here’s an example of how it works:

FAQs

Can I require make my customer information public, while also following privacy laws?

Registrars are mandated by ICANN policies to release information to the public. Personal information, including email address and phone number, is by default intended to be made public when a consumer registers a domain.

The EEA, where customers are safeguarded by the GDPR, is the only region in which ICANN will permit a registrar to “redact” Whois registrant information. This, in our opinion, is not a total privacy solution. And this is why:

First off, a lot of registrants live outside the EEA and prefer that their Whois information not be made public. Despite the fact that individuals can be protected by country laws from having their information published, As a registrar, you have the option of applying “redaction” to all domains that permit it. Redaction alone does not shield your consumers from “onward sharing,” which is required by other parties like registries.