Forum

Is it possible to have "partial privacy"?
For example, to change everything that the standard
privacy system changes in the whois info, except for
the e-mail address.
Given the importance of the e-mail address in every
process with a domain, I'm much more confident if I keep
my own original address.  I can do with a little (or a
lot of) spam in exchange for not being scared of having
problems with my domains.

If this is not possible, I'd ask you to take it into
consideration for the future.


[This post has been edited by anydtodus on Sep 24, 2007 1:47am.]

I agree that partial privacy would be nice. My main concern is that I don't want to display my physical address and home telephone number, but I can show my real name and an email address. I don't want that everybody knows where I live.
It should be nice if you dynadot could result in the technical contact section.

With the current "domain privacy" of Dynadot, only the name of the registrant is visible. As mentioned, it would be nice if there were other "partial privacy" options.

For example, if we had the option of keeping both name and address visible, but keeping e-mail address private. I think it is the e-mail address being public on the Internet that causes most people to want to have a private registration.

The average person who is running a small business may not mind if their name and business address are both visible, but would perhaps wish to keep their home address and e-mail address as private as possible.

Clearly different people have different views on what they would like to be kept private, and it would be good if we had some choice over this.

Perhaps in line with Dynadot policy, this could be along the lines of: name always visible, and the rest left up to the registrant to decide on a case by case basis.

Thank you.


[This post has been edited by just_a_thought on Sep 26, 2007 2:38am.]

Thank you very much, aiofe, for this excellent article, so much interesting information in it.

Something you may want to consider with regards to making any part of your whois private:
(The following is from an ICANN meeting that took place in Lisbon in March this year and this particular segment was presented by Rob Hall of Momentous.CA (namescout.com, rebel.com, interNIC.CA, pool.com etc) )

We currently have a lawsuit against a bunch of people that were committing fraud in our domain marketplace. We started a lawsuit, we sued all the registrants of the domain names and one of them happened to be a domain privacy service run by a registrar.

If we're successful in the suit, we would have a judgment against potentially against that privacy service, and if they were not able to pay the judgment, we could go in and say I want the 400,000 domains that are under that privacy service that they are the registrant of, even though they may be leased or committed to other people, that's an asset of that privacy service. So people need to understand what privacy service are and how they could be attacked or sold separately from a registrar.

It's also much easier to sue a UDRP in privacy service because the privacy service may have no rights to use the domain under a UDRP.

And we're seeing that, certainly, as well.
http://www.icann.org/meetings/lisbon/transcript-tutorial-expiring-25mar07.htm

Another thing that is a current topic of debate is whether it's better to have whois privacy or not in the case of your domain being hijacked.
With privacy it is much harder to prove ownership and regain control of your domain as there is no whois record of you being the owner of the domain,
Sure you may have paypal reciepts, screenshots of it being in your account etc (All easily faked) but a whois record is very hard to dispute (There are paid tools available to check the whois history of a domain) and this record will be one of your strongest assets in proving ownership.

Unfortunately, we do not provide partial domain privacy at this time.  Your suggestion has merit, so I have appended your request to a similar "partial privacy" request (on our feature request list) that another customer has made to us in another forum post, Partial domain privacy?.