The Importance of Domain Privacy! Is It Really Valuable?

The Internet is a revolutionary product of human innovation. Life has undergone a tremendous change since the inception of the internet. Today, no one could imagine how they could have lived in the present day without the internet. Right from seeking information to booking movie tickets to finding the way in a new city to a medical expert sitting in New York giving advice to his counterpart in Perth, the internet has touched every aspect of human life.

All said and done internet is a virtual world wherein finding the original identities is a daunting task. It is a world where all are not fakes and yet all are not real. What one sees and perceives as original might turn out to be unreal. Similarly, from unknown and unexpected corners of the world, a loving and caring personality helps a person who is cheesed off by harsh life.

All these pros and cons of the internet present a ‘Catch 11’ situation that always occurs and mistaken identities create lots of headaches. Spammers, hackers, and many such crooks started devastating the internet arena and creating havoc. In addition to these misdeeds, virus programs started creeping into the databases. Malware and spyware attacks were intensified. All these things resulted in the loss of the personal identity of internet users and millions of dollars were stolen.

This has given rise to the need of securing the data available on the internet and more particularly with the personal data of the people.

Flip Side of the Privacy

The data privacy thus granted to all sections of internet users has brought up another set of challenges when a few misguided people started opening offensive and abusive websites by hiding their original identities.

To avoid such mishaps and to reduce the recurrences to the best possible extent, the international overseer of internet-related tasks called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has made a few policies. One of the policies deals exclusively with domain registrations and the rule makes it mandatory for the registrants to publicly announce their identity details like name, address, telephone number, etc.

Once again the public display of personal information started giving headaches to domain owners. Scammers, frauds, and telemarketing guys too have started misusing the publically available contact details.

Domain Privacy

The rising concern over the data of personal contact details of domain owners has brought up a debate to secure them. As a result of this “domain proxy” came up for discussion. In domain proxy, the original contact details of the domain owner are replaced with concealed, and generic information would be displayed on whois proxy databases. In this whois privacy, people who wish to know the actual details have to send an email request which will be forwarded to the domain owner. Owners can take a decision on divulging the details.

Is Domain Privacy Worthy?

There have been debates on the usefulness of domain privacy. Users were split into groups, a few supported it and a few opposed it, and others were tightlipped. Those who were in favor of the privacy of domain owner details have argued that privacy does help them in protecting their niche websites from being preyed on by scammers and competitors.

On contrary to this, some people who were not in favor of domain privacy have opined that by masking the contact details, owners might be losing out on new customers. They say that by looking at the contact details, new customers may knock on the doors of the website. Detractors of domain privacy further argued that when a brick-and-mortar business firm could able to protect the personal data of the owner, why not the domain owners could do the same?

Those who adopted a neutral stance thought that there are both advantages and disadvantages of domain proxy. They feel that the domains could be registered by giving out a pen name instead of the original name and office address or PO Box number in place of the residential address of a domain owner.

Domain Proxy Services

Now there are a few companies that offer domain proxy services and among them, whois proxy is one reputed company. A domain proxy service generally includes protection from identity theft, stalking, spamming, data mining, etc. Proxy services offer protection against harassment too.

A word of caution to those people who wish to opt for domain proxy protection services is that they must provide accurate, reliable, and correct details about the registrant’s name, address, and email id. Proxy service providers extend protection for all these details. But if there is any violation from the registrant in providing accurate information would lead to not only the locking of the domain but the same might be taken away by ICANN the global supervising body of domains.

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