Spam is only the beginning. Wait until a crazy person gets angry at yuor site.

Whois data is also a dox/social engineering entry point.

But at least in Germany (and perhaps other EU countries?) website owners are required to provide contact details on the website. That's not exactly the same as domains and WHOIS, but it is similar enough to show that the German state (rightly perhaps) doesn't actually care about this sort of privacy.

It's only the DACH region to my knowledge and you can still do a lot to prevent spammers from getting the details.

That basically includes most of the default anti-scraping methods but since you only have one page to do it on, it's far simple to get 99% of the bad guys out (Spammers usually stop bothering once you get more advanced than ROT13 via Javascript or images designed to trip up OCR but still being readable)

Spam and scraping are not the problem, real people are. Getting a nutjob show up with a gun at your office because you are required by law to make your contact and address details public ain't fun, and not something that you can solve with ROT13 in Javascript.

Nutjobs with guns showing up anywhere to shoot up people is rare in my country to the point that I worry more about the extra electricity consumed by transmitting my imprint.

Sorry, but how often does that happen?

Not often enough that I care tbh.

If somebody has legal beef with me, having a contact address to quickly resolve it is more important.

Besides that, you can always simply get legal with the registrar who will get them your address anyway (or escalate until you find somebody who knows who you are)

Oh no someone is sending nasty messages. If your on the web it's to be expected.

It's all fun & games until your doorbell rings.

Or you hear the police shouting.

Ain't that the truth.

It's more of a problem if they know your phone number and where you live.

not when they start posting stuff with your name on social and other media, or threatening you that they know where u live

Putting in false information is grounds for losing a domain. I don't know if anyone has lost a domain for fake info but it could technically happen.

Happened to me a week ago. I had to hop and scream at my host to get it back.

This is why I'm happy the EU is twisting ICANN's arm. This information shouldn't be easy for spammers to harvest.

It's mainly only the address you should worried about, but really a domain should have an owner associated with it. Do you complain about public records for who owns a plot of land?

Yeah, but a million Indians don't send me a letter offering me construction services when I buy a plot of land.

..but they could.

..but they don't

I registered a new domain last month and since have been getting several spam telephone calls a day. The calls come from fake "local" numbers too so they are incredibly hard to screen. Some calls are companies trying to sell me web design services, and some, I think, are just trying to verify if this is "live" number so they can sell it off to other spammers. I can effectively can only trust new calls from numbers I personally know now, and have missed several real calls because I've stopped answering anything else.

These sorts of calls are infuriating when working at a web des/dev company. No we don't any need dev/design services -- we registered that domain because we're doing that!

Looking to change the number out to a voicemail transcription number now that things are picking up so it's easier to filter out the duff calls

I did the same thing on accident a while back. If you have T-Mobile, they have a service called Name ID that will screen calls and auto-reject them. It works tremendously. It's included in the T-Mobile Plus service if you have it.

whois realms.org

My personal info has been on whois since 1995.

Am I ok?

Mines been online forever. Once it’s out ther once you’re done. No point in trying to hide from it I guess.

RIP