Do I have any legal recourse against a registrar for Whois issues?

[elir]

Hi NamePros,

I'm hoping one of you can help answer a question for me. A little over a year ago I registered some domain names that I'm not proud of. I made a stupid mistake, basically.

I purchased a whois privacy subscription from my registrar when I purchased my names because I didn't want to have my personal information associated with these domains.

Throughout the entire length of the time I owned the domains, the privacy service was in effect and my name never showed up on the whois information.

I decided not to renew the domains (bought them just for one year) and during the drop process my whois privacy was removed. So my personal information was then associated with the domains even though I did not own them or wish to own them anymore.

During this time frame a website that crawls and indexes whois results picked up my info. Now, google proudly displays those domains whenever you search for my name. I've attempted to contact the site to have them removed and have yet to hear anything.

I'm curious though: Do I have any recourse against the registrar? Is it normal to drop your whois privacy during the drop process and am I just out of luck, or did my registrar screw up? Thanks for any help or advice that you can provide.

 

[dompro]

you have paid for 1 year of whois privacy service, once the year is over they had a full right to remove it, so you don't have a case here.

That would not be an issue if you use one of those registrars that offer whois privacy with each domain (for example internet.bs). I would assume they would keep whois privacy during expiry/drop process as they would have no reason to change the privacy settings you had set for your domain, since it is free and not a paid term.

 

[alien51]

Is it normal to drop your whois privacy during the drop process and am I just out of luck, or did my registrar screw up?

Yes, you were just out of luck.

What you could have done, was to simply change your whois information with FAKE data. No need to buy privacy protection if your whois data is intentionally false.

 

[elir]

you have paid for 1 year of whois privacy service, once the year is over they had a full right to remove it, so you don't have a case here.

That would not be an issue if you use one of those registrars that offer whois privacy with each domain (for example internet.bs). I would assume they would keep whois privacy during expiry/drop process as they would have no reason to change the privacy settings you had set for your domain, since it is free and not a paid term.

Thanks for the help!

 

[Kate]

During this time frame a website that crawls and indexes whois results picked up my info. Now, google proudly displays those domains whenever you search for my name. I've attempted to contact the site to have them removed and have yet to hear anything.

Some of these sites keep old records in archive, like Domaintools. But I guess many won't, they just fetch and cache the current whois record.
I think it's a matter of time until they refresh their data. Perhaps the domain is still not deleted.
When the domain is deleted and possibly registered again, you could visit that site to force a refresh perhaps.
Google will normally revisit at some point and update their own data. You can also invite them to crawl the page again as soon as it is purged of your data.

 

[DubDubDubDot]

Send him a hand written snail mail letter politely asking him to remove it. I think that would really increase your chances.