Domain Privacy Protection but Still Expose Registrant Information ?

2016-03-10


Domain privacy protection service costs extra money compared to domain renewal fee to "hide" registrant's information so that private information could be protected due to security handling.

If people want to create website, they have to buy domain name at present (We do not have new technology to create website without a domain name, otherwise you will have to tell everybody your website's IP address, but sometimes your IP address keeps changing). However, our domain name registrant information are public by default, everybody can see your private information using Whois service.

What if we just let the registrant information be public ?

Some domain name owners say they don't care about their information is exposed to public. But we know there are countless spammers and scammers in the world. They are trying to steal your private information to do something which might be bad to you. For example: Using your name, address and phone number to do something which is related to your financial account; or using your personal information to rent a car and never returned backā€¦ etc.

So normally domain register services provide Domain Privacy Protect service, to protect your domain name registrant information, hide your personal address, your name, your phone, your email address, and to be replaced with a business company information such as from the privacy service provider.

A Highlight Domain Privacy Protect service purchasing process.

Our domains are stored on Godaddy.com, which is called the biggest domain service in the world. If you have domains on Godaddy and want to do private service, just go to your domain management UI, then select the domain (You will have to do the process in each of domain on current Godaddy platform), you can see Private option, check it on, Godaddy will lead you to shop cart to check out here. Note: You will have to select continue to check out so that you can go to shop cart, if you do not do this but want to select more domains for privacy service, sorry, you can not. otherwise you would find you did not add any domain to cart actually. I think this is a kind of issue on Godaddy, we do not want to go to shopping cart before we adding all our domain names to be privacy protected.

Does it work well after we purchased Domain Privacy Protect service ?

We think most of people buy the domain privacy service should work correctly. We bought the domain privacy protect service from Godaddy, and the information protection seems effective soon after. But we did not check the effective time until the next day actually.

However, we found the strange result when we checked: Part of our private information were still exposed to public, the information mostly was our name, the registrant name.

Here is the screen shot when we checked Who.is service, we see our name was shown at registrant name item (at Raw registrar data section)

image

We were surprised to see our private information did not be protected fully.

Later we followed the step which was mentioned above in the screenshot to check the whois information on Godaddy platform. We saw our full private information seems have been replaced by privacy service provider business information this time, which should be correct. Then we went back to Who.is website to check our domain whois information again, this time we found our full private information were hidden completely, which was completely different with the page which we saw at our first checking.

Here is the new screen:

image

Questions to Godaddy:

We do not know why the things are happened and seems so wired. We will have to ask Godaddy later. We are writting this post is just for the preparation of questions to Godaddy, and for a complete issue description so that Godaddy could check the issue easily (let us call it is an issue temporarily). We will contact Godaddy to figure out the real reason.

And, we double checked, we purchased multiple domain's Privacy Services, if we did not do the step of "check whois information on Godaddy", our real registrant name will be exposed to public forever on Who.is website. Godaddy can try themselves to confirm this.

We guess Godaddy system did not automatically update our privacy information, until we checked the whois information manually ? If it is true, then it is should be Godaddy system's issue.

We will update this post after we get answers from Godaddy. so keep watching our website to get more content.