: Postal address in Whois information, how bad of an idea is this? I currently have my full contact details (including my phone number and postal address) in the WHOIS information for all the

@YK1175434

If you own a lot of domain names, then my one bit of advice would be to get a PO Box, as I did. It's about for one year (cheaper than a few "private registrations"). I visit mine about once a month, and it's crammed full of "domain transfer" and "we can improve your search ratings for a payment of $xxx" paper mail. I used to list my work address, but I was getting too many odd questions from fellow workers (that seemed to match what I later found out to be missing mail). But I digress.

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@Shelton105

If someone can work out when you are away from home from your blog, there is a small risk that they will get your address from the WhoIs information then pay a visit to your house.

Now if your blog talks about something that is worth stealing…

However there are so many other ways to find houses of people that are away that I don’t think the risk is great.

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@Nickens628

The domain-related danger is that you'll get unwanted sales contacts from people who want to sell you domain registration or other domain/net-related services.

It's also a way for your personal contact details to leak out into the world at large. Some people care about privacy, some don't. This usually depends a lot on your personality and the risk factors in your life and in the lives of the people who live with you. If you have a hobby or a profession where you tend to make people angry*, it's plausible that sooner or later one of the people you've made angry will want to use your contact information to hassle or threaten you. The same is true if other family members who are easily connected to you are likely to attract stalkers or angry people.

(*For example, I'm an attorney. I don't spend the majority of my time on civil lawsuits but I do sue people and defend people who have been sued. Sometimes the people involved in lawsuits are very angry at each other, and sometimes they transfer that anger to the other party's lawyer, especially if the lawyer is doing a good job. And sometimes clients get angry if they think the lawyer should have won a case but they ended up losing. So I am careful about my personal contact details so that it's tougher for an unbalanced person to bother me at home.)

So the question is not just "do I want to be bothered by salespeople?" but also "how likely is it that my family or I will at some point attract unwanted attention from people who don't know where we live, and that the person(s) who are angry at me will be able to use my domain registration to find me?"

I provide my contact information in the domain names that I've registered, but the contact information I provide is my work address and telephone number, and we've already got systems and procedures in place at my office to deal with salespeople and crazy people.

I think it's a good idea for everyone to have a "business address" (maybe just a PO Box) that doesn't reveal where they and their children sleep at night. But I'm a person who likes privacy.

And, for what it's worth, if I am looking for information on someone, either to decide whether or not they've got assets to make them worth suing, or to find them to have them served with a summons or a subpoena, I'll look at the WHOIS data for any domains that they own, and troll through Google looking for contact information. I've had one case in particular where a dentist who owes my client a lot of money has registered multiple domains, which I found by paying domaintools.com for information, and those domains have revealed additional undisclosed assets and businesses to go after to collect money owed to my client. So it's not unrealistic paranoia to think that someone might use your domain registrations in a fashion that's not friendly to your interests.

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@Pope3001725

The primary consequences are your contact information is publicly available which means registrars may try to solicit you to switch to them. A company was recently busted for sending mail suggesting that domain owners had to renew their domain and tried to get users to do it through their website which also transferred the domain to them (for a higher fee). Other companies do the same thing but in a less shady manner. You may also get other legitimate solicitations to buy the domain and/or website, etc.

Spammers do crawl whois records harvesting email addresses so a public whois record will almost certainly result in an increase in spam. But this can be easily mitigated by using a forwarder as the email address you use to register and periodically change it once the spam gets too bad.

I have used anonymous domain registrations in the past and I can't say it really made any difference other then not getting any mail from registrars trying to get me to switch to them. The cost is small so doing it won't really hit you in the wallet but I don't think it's worth the cost or effort.

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