What is Domain Privacy?

Many website hosting companies offer Domain Privacy as an option – but what does it mean? And is it worth paying for?

If I do a query on the domain bbc.co.uk I get the following result

/home/neil# whois bbc.co.uk

Domain name:
bbc.co.uk

Registrant:
British Broadcasting Corporation

Registrant type:
UK Corporation by Royal Charter

Registrant's address:
British Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcasting House
Portland Place
London
W1A 1AA
United Kingdom

Data validation:
Nominet was able to match the registrant's name and address against a 3rd party data source on 12-Jun-2014

Registrar:
British Broadcasting Corporation [Tag = BBC]
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk

Relevant dates:
Registered on: before Aug-1996
Expiry date:  13-Dec-2025
Last updated:  29-Oct-2016

As can be seen within the results is the address of the domain’s registrant:

Registrant’s address:
British Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcasting House
Portland Place
London
W1A 1AA
United Kingdom

For a business with an office, providing this information on the Internet is acceptable. However, for an individual its possible that they may not wish to give away such details.

Domain Privacy hides the registrant’s address.

There are many tools and websites which can be used to find this information. One you may wish to try is

whois.org