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GoDaddy starts protecting American customers’ privacy

Kevin Murphy, June 9, 2020, 18:39:14 (UTC), Domain Registrars

GoDaddy has today started redacting the Whois records of its US-based customers, bringing them into line with the European counterparts.

The company was one of the few registrars to differentiate its European customers from those elsewhere when it implemented the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation two years ago, primarily because it was also one of the dwindling number of registrars charging for Whois privacy services.

American privacy customers are reportedly to be offered a partial refund or the chance to upgrade to a service that also includes two-factor authentication and malware scans.

From today, Whois records for American registrants only show a registrant organization, state and country. Email addresses and phone numbers are gone.

While this is no doubt a boon to most GoDaddy customers in terms of privacy protection, it’s likely to cause frowns in those parts of the community that rely upon Whois to make the job of tracking down ne’er-do-wells easier.

As the largest registrar by a considerable margin, the likes of law enforcement, intellectual property owners and security researchers have just lost access to millions of records.

There is a contact form at the bottom of each record that can be used to get in touch with the registrant, via GoDaddy, so it should still be possible to communicate with those who want to be communicated with.

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Comments (2)

  1. John says:

    The important thing is that American citizens and businesses still have no right of privacy with their own country code domain since 2002, .us.

    Good thing that’s still the case. Wouldn’t want that.

  2. gpm group says:

    Not sure why when registrants who don’t want their information publicly displayed why the registrar can’t just put their own contact details in the WHOIS and then take responsibility for the domain?

    This seems too easy….

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