What is Domain Privacy Protection?

My name is Tony and I am one of the current Second line technical support technicians. I started with LCN on the front line, providing first line technical support to customers who called, e-mailed or used our live chat service requesting assistance.

I have a varied IT background including being a webmaster for a large PLC company. As a second line technician at LCN, I now resolve the issues that the first line staff are unable to resolve for the customers themselves, or requires task escalation.

Today I wanted to provide you with a blog post regarding WHOIS Privacy Protection

When you register a com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .me or .mobi domain the contact details of the owner become publicly accessible in an online database called WHOIS.
The WHOIS database displays details such as your name, address, e-mail and phone number. This information can be searched by anyone – including spammers mining for e-mail addresses and fraudsters looking for identities to steal.

There are several governing bodies and the biggest two are Nominet and ICANN.

Nominet are responsible for any domain name that ends in .UK If you are a UK registered individual, your personal details are omitted from the WHOIS database under Nominet’s natural opt out system, the only information visible is your personal name. If however you register the domain name to a company within the organization field, the full address details are shown – much the same as a top level domain name. More details are available at the link below:
http://www.nominet.org.uk/other/whois/optout/

ICANN are responsible for the following top level domain names which end with .info, .biz, .com, .net and .org ICANN will always show your full details unless you make use of a domain name privacy system such as the one we offer at http://www.lcn.com/domain_privacy_protector

It is worth reading the information from our domain privacy link, even if you choose not to use it. The information is always useful for domain owners to understand just what information is displayed about them, and what could be publicly attainable about you.
Generally we would suggest that you protect your personal details in order to protect yourself from possible spam and also the risk of identify theft.
The charge of the privacy system is £4.95 per year per domain name which is equivalent to less than £0.10 per week which is a small price to pay for peace of mind from spam and identify theft.

If you have any questions or feedback please leave a comment below.