What is WHOIS and how to hide your personal data from it
After registering a domain your name, email and phone can end up in the public WHOIS database. Here is how WHOIS Privacy works.
What WHOIS is
WHOIS is a public registry that stores information about every registered domain: who owns it, when it was registered, when it expires, which NS servers it uses. Anyone can run a WHOIS query and see this data.
What data is visible
- Owner's name and organization
- Email and phone
- Registration and expiry dates
- Registrar and domain statuses (e.g. clientTransferProhibited)
- NS servers
Thanks to GDPR and registry policies, most personal data in European zones is now hidden by default, but in many gTLDs without extra protection your email and phone are still exposed — and harvested by spammers.
What WHOIS Privacy is
It's a service that shows a proxy's details in WHOIS instead of yours. Mail sent to the "masked" email is forwarded to you. Many registrars (Porkbun, Cloudflare, Namecheap) include privacy for free, enabled by default; some charge $5–15/year. Worth factoring in when you compare prices.
When WHOIS is useful to you
- Check whether a domain is available, and when a taken one expires.
- Find out a domain's registrar before buying on the aftermarket.
- Verify your own domain's statuses before a transfer.