/guides · /guides/domain-privacy
Domain privacy / WHOIS redaction
Registration has always required real contact details. What changed is who gets to see them — and the answer now depends on the ending, the registrar and who is asking.
What the public record contains
Registries publish a record for every domain, historically through WHOIS and increasingly through RDAP, its structured successor. It holds the registrar, the creation date, the domain expiry date, the nameservers, the domain status codes, and some form of contact information.
The dates, the nameservers and the statuses are always public. The contact details are the part that varies.
Redaction versus privacy services
These are two different mechanisms and people routinely conflate them.
Redaction is the registry or registrar withholding personal contact fields from the public response, largely as a consequence of data-protection law. It often applies by default and costs nothing. A privacy service replaces your details with a proxy's, so the record shows the proxy and forwards mail to you. Registrars may include it or charge for it.
Neither hides anything from the registrar itself, and neither makes you anonymous to a court order or a valid legal request.
When it does not apply
That last row is the one people underestimate. If a domain was registered with public details years ago, turning privacy on now changes the current record, not the copies already collected.
Your details still have to be correct
Privacy hides your details from the public; it does not excuse you from providing accurate ones. Deliberately false registration data is grounds for suspension under ICANN policy, and registrars do act on verification failures. Redaction and accuracy are separate obligations — and correcting inaccurate details is worth doing early, because a change of registrant details starts a fresh 60-day transfer lock.
Should you use it
For a personal domain registered from a home address, yes — the alternative is publishing where you live. For a business already listing its address on its own website, the benefit is mostly a reduction in spam and cold-calling rather than genuine privacy.
Before you decide whether you need a privacy service, look at what your own domain publishes today: our WHOIS and RDAP lookup shows the live record, redactions and all.