Question
What is Whois Privacy Protection and why one might need it?
Answer
Privacy Protection is a service that hides the domain owner details from public WHOIS and replaces it with information of a forwarding service.
When one registers a domain name, one's contact details are included in the publicly available WHOIS database. Sometimes it's undesirable to have this data available publicly for the reasons of spam protection or domain hijacking.
The level of data disclosure depends on the registry. Some enable privacy by default (.de, .eu) whereas others (.us, .in) forbid it altogether.
For instance, in the case of a typical private VeriSign domain with WPP enabled, Openprovider, among other fields hidden by default, will substitute the registrant's organisation name, their state/province and the country:
Without WPP:
Domain Name: example.net
Registrant Name: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Organization:
Registrant Street: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant City: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant State/Province: Pennsylvania
Registrant Postal Code: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Phone Ext: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Fax: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Fax Ext: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Email: https://contact-form.registrar.eu/?domainName=op-zone-exists.net&purpose=owner
With WPP enabled:
Domain Name: example.net
Registrant Name: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Organization: Whois Privacy Protection Foundation
Registrant Street: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant City: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant State/Province: Zuid-Holland
Registrant Postal Code: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Country: NL
Registrant Phone: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Phone Ext: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Fax: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Fax Ext: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
Registrant Email: https://contact-form.registrar.eu/?domainName=op-zone-exists.net&purpose=owner
See TLD reference sheet for a list of TLDs supporting the service (column AJ)
Regarding GDPR Regulations
GDPR took place 2 years ago.
We are not able to show customer details in whois.
This means, by default, even if you active or not the whois privacy, will appear "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY".
There's nothing that we can do about this. We will have to respect GDPR Rules.
Due to GDPR, some fields in the Whois will always be redacted for privacy (even when the WPP is turned off) in order to comply with the regulations.
Also, it's not possible to enter an email address in the Registrant Email field, due to GDPR. In this field there will be a contact form that will allow to send an email to the registrant.
For more info, you can see this Knowledge Base Article.
