Domain privacy? Is it really private or can it be sold?

[mickeyshore]

I'm thinking about using some online services that claim to sell you information about owners of past domain registrations. I've tried to ask them some questions about domains that had privacy on them, but they dance around the answer.

My question is a simple one: If a now expired domain was registered using privacy protection, can the information about the domains past owner now be purchased from one of these services? I thought that if a domain was registered with privacy, that info would NEVER be made public even after the domain expired.

Thanks.

 

[Dave_Z]

Welcome to the forum.

Based on my ex-registrar work and what I've learned from my ex-peers, the simplest answer I can offer is that really depends on the registrar itself.

Indeed, the domain name's actual info is never revealed when registered with privacy protection. That, however, depends if/when the privacy protection took effect.

 

[alien51]

DomainTools is one online service that sells WHOIS record history. If i understand it correctly, DomainTools uses a crawler/bot to take a snapshot of your whois data as displayed by your registrar. And that snapshot "is" the historical whois data for your domain. So that means, if the snapshot shows some Domain Proxy whois privacy, then that's the one that will show up on the whois record history that they will sell about that domain.

I haven't paid DomainTools myself, but based on their test sample, i looked up the whois history of one of my domains, and the only thing i see there for the last 5 years is DomainsByProxy (i have privacy enabled).

I am not sure if there are other Third Party online services out there, who actually mine the whois records direct from the registrar (bypassing the proxy privacy shield).

Another thing....

Some Registrars, when you drop your domain, they disable your Whois privacy but retain your registrant info publicly displayed for an extended period of time. They don't erase your registrant info, evenif the domain is already "Pending Delete". Your personal info is now publicly available and you no longer have control over it.

So what i do when i am going to drop my domain that has privacy, i replace the Registrant info with bogus data before i let it expire.