What’s the point of private registration?

[EricBeckham]

I have some domains with private registration and some without. When I do a whois on the domains, I can’t see a difference. No registrant info shows for any of them. So why pay? Am i missing something or looking at the whois wrong? Very confused.

[MrVapor]

@EricBeckham 

I'm not sure which WhoIs portal you're using, so I can't comment on that. I can tell you what private registration does, though.

There are groups and groups of people online that scrape the public information from domain registrations because most people don't know that their information becomes public. So, their information is scraped and sold to email marketers, telemarketers, etc., and this usually ends up with you having to deal with that annoyance. With private registration, it's much harder to get that info.

[EricBeckham]

I used several including GoDaddy. Also, when I manage my domains in my account screen, and look at contact info, a couple say “Your information is private” but show my info. And other ones say that same thing PLUS show the Domains by Proxy info. What’s the difference?

[TLH]

Hi @EricBeckham,

You an always see more data on the domain in your account than the public can see in the various whois directories online (and there are many). You can read more about the Private Registration features here. There will even be an example near the bottom showing the way the domain is listed. 

[EricBeckham]

Thanks. I understand all that. I don’t get why some of my “private” domains show Domains by Proxy snd some don’t even though both say private. The ones that aren’t private only seem to show my info if i do a whois at godaddy.

[JesseW · Accepted solution]

Hey @EricBeckham. Thanks for posting. If you'd be willing to provide the domains as examples, that may help the Community better understand what is happening. If not, then I'd recommend reaching out to our care team so they can dig into what's happening with you.