WHOIS privacy hides your personal contact details from public WHOIS and RDAP lookups. It's included at no extra charge with every domain whose extension allows it.
What's hidden and what stays public
With privacy on, public lookups don't show:
- Your name and organization
- Your street address, city and postal code
- Your phone number
- Your email address, which is replaced by a link to a contact form
These stay public:
- The domain name and its creation, expiration and last-updated dates
- Its nameservers and status codes
- The registrar, OrbitFour
- Your state or province and country
Privacy isn't anonymity. Your real details can still be disclosed for legal process, ICANN policy, UDRP or URS cases, abuse investigations and valid intellectual-property claims. You also still have to keep them accurate. See Keeping your WHOIS data accurate.
How people can still reach you
Each privacy-protected domain has a contact form at /contact/ followed by the domain name, for example /contact/example.com. Its RDAP record links there.
Messages sent through the form go to the email addresses of the domain's contacts. The sender gets a confirmation. When you reply, your reply goes straight to the sender, so they will see your email address.
We screen messages for spam and abuse and limit how many one sender can send. We can't guarantee every message arrives, so keep an eye on your contact email.
Turning it on or off
At checkout, the WHOIS Privacy switch is on by default for each domain that allows it. To change it later:
- Go to Domains and open the domain.
- In the Settings section, find WHOIS Privacy ("Hide personal info from WHOIS").
- Flip the switch. A message confirms when the change is saved.
If you turn privacy off, your contact details become visible in public lookups. Our RDAP results change right away. At some registries, updating the contact on file takes a little longer.
Extensions that don't allow privacy
Some registries require registrant details to be public. The best-known is .us, whose nexus rules forbid privacy. For these extensions, checkout shows that WHOIS privacy is not available.
See TLD requirements for each extension's rules, and the WHOIS Privacy Service Terms for the full terms.