What 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 are required to display acts as a vast address book for domains. Each Whois record contains details on the registrant (.e.g. you), registrar (e.g., Stack), 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 being 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, one choice you can make is to use our domain privacy service.
Wikipedia Article on Domain Privacy
Activate Domain Privacy
To activate this paid for service login to your Client Portal and select ‘Client Area’, under ‘Manage Services click ‘Domains’
Once you have your domains listed click ‘manage’ for the domain you wish to apply Domain Privacy to.
Click the ‘Domain Privacy’ icon and follow the payment process.
In some cases you may not be able to see the ‘Domain Privacy’ icon.
Domain Privacy icon not appearing
This is because your domain extension cannot have Domain Privacy applied to it due to registry restrictions such as the following extensions…
.ca, .ch, .cn, .co.in, .co.uk, .com.au, .com.es, .com.sg, .de, .es, .eu, .fr, .gg, .id, .in, .is, .law, .li, .me.uk, .net.au, .nl, .nom.es, .nu, .nyc, .org.es, .org.au, .org.uk, .paris, .sg, .to, .uk, .us, .vote, .voto, and .xn--3ds443g domains”
OR Domain Privacy is already applied by default such as with the .co domain extension.
