The exportation of personal data outside the EU is regulated by the
GDPR. GDPR is important because it improves the protection of European data subjects’ rights, and clarifies what companies that process personal data must do to safeguard these rights.
What is Whois and why do I need privacy protection for my domain?
Domain privacy protection tools allow you to mask the contact information in Whois, which you provided when registering your domain name.
Whois is an online public directory that maintains a record of all domain registrations. This includes domain registrant details, verifications, their expiry, renewal dates, and more.
Usually, domain registrants can add domain privacy protection during the registration with their domain registrar, often for an additional fee.
Our customers’ security and safety are a top priority for us and that is why we are offering privacy protection for free.
What types of privacy do you offer?
We offer two types of privacy protection, the Domain Privacy provided by Withheldforprivacy.com, and the ability to redact your domain information in our Whois.
What is Domain Privacy provided by Withheldforprivacy.com?
Domain Privacy is a Whois protection service provided by the
Withheld for Privacy company. It prevents people from seeing your name, address, phone number and email
when they do a Whois search on your domain. It puts its address
information to the public Whois instead of yours to protect you from
potential spam and even identity theft.
Here is what the Whois output for the protected domain looks like:
Your personal email address(es)
(registrant, admin and technical) will be replaced with a unique Withheldforprivacy.com one
(e.g. 35180ba032214a9387fe517f46b6037d.protect@withheldforprivacy.com), and every email sent to it will be forwarded to your email address. You may check more details about how the Domain Privacy works in
How does Domain Privacy work?.
To enhance online presence privacy, you also have an option to schedule the change of your Withheldforprivacy.com email address every few days. This should provide you with additional protection from spam, as mail harvested from Whois becomes invalid in a few days.
Unfortunately, not all registries allow using the privacy protection tools. Here is a list of the TLDs Domain Privacy cannot be used with: .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, .xn--3ds443g domains.
Are there any alternatives to Withheldforprivacy.com?
To prevent your personal details from being displayed in Whois for the majority of the aforementioned TLDs (in cases when the Registry Operator allows this), we've implemented the 'Redacted for Privacy' option.
It redacts your name, address, phone number, and email for the domains that don't have Domain Privacy assigned in our Whois database:
Please note that only the State/Province and Country will be shown in our Whois directory for the domains that using the 'Redacted for Privacy' option.
If you want to
disable 'Redacted for Privacy' mask and have your contacts published in Namecheap Whois, please contact our
Support Team.
It will be possible to enable the mask back if your domain has no anytime with the help of our Support Team if you need to have the details masked. The updated result will be shown within 30 minutes in Namecheap Whois Lookup.
We're legally obliged by ICANN to ensure that anyone can contact the domain holder but we will never disclose personal contact details to a third party without a
valid reason.
That is why we have implemented a 'Contact domain holder' form. After clicking on the link to a form, a modal window appears where the requester can choose the domain contact to get in touch with (your email address(es) are not displayed there):
Requesters will be also prompted to add their email address and message so you can get back to them if you wish of course.
We’ve also added captcha there that is protecting you from the domain-related spam.
Once the requester submits a form, you will get a corresponding notification to your registrant/admin/technical email address.
NB! There is still a small number of TLDs we manage through the upstream provider (e.g. .FR, .CH, .**.AU, etc.), Domain Privacy, and the 'Redacted for Privacy' option cannot be used with them, unfortunately. Also, the 'Redacted for Privacy' option cannot be applied to .CA domains with Corporation legal type. However, usually, the Whois output for these TLDs is redacted anyways by the registry. In rare cases when it's not, additional actions can be required from their side to mask your details.
If you face any issues with applying privacy protection for your domain, please get in touch with our
Support Team. Thank you.
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