For Domain’s that don’t have any eligibility criteria, it is possible to purchase an additional service known as Domain Privacy. This can also be known as WHOIS Privacy.

Domain Privacy is available for the category of domains known as gTLDs. This acronym stands for generic top-level domains and refers to domains that aren’t country coded. These are known as ccTLDs. A clear example of the two is;

• gTLD: http://infinite.com
• ccTLD: http://infinite.com.au

Further common examples of generic top-level domains are;

• .com
• .net
• .org
• .biz

Every domain has the following contact details listed with it.

Registrant

These are details of the individual or organisation that has purchased the domain. Transfer authorisation emails are sent to only the registrant contact email and renewal/expiry notices are also only sent to the registrant email.

Tech Contact

Traditionally this contains the contact details of an individual or organisation that looks after the website from a technical standpoint. This could be your IT Department or another supplier.

Billing Contact

Similar to the Tech Contact, these contact details should contain the organisation or individual who handles the billing of the domain. This might be perhaps your Billing Department details or an external company that handles your billing.

Admin Contact

This contact was created to assign the contact details of an organisation or individual who would be managing the information of the domain.

You can see what contact information is publicly available for your domain by performing a whois query. This can be performed either via your terminal/command prompt or you can use one of the many online lookup tools if you want to use an interactive form. Simply, google “whois” to see the many platforms you can use. All platforms should be free so if the site is asking for payment then you should not be using it.

.au domains can officially be looked up using audDA’s lookup tool: https://whois.auda.org.au/

So far, you should understand what contact details are available for each domain and you will be able to see what information the public can see about your domain.

Well, Domain Privacy redacts all of those contact details for Registrant, Tech, Billing and Admin. When the Domain Privacy has been implemented, it will display details as;

A business should use Domain Privacy where possible to hide the genuine contact information of their domain contacts to mitigate the number of possible SPAM emails or attempted phishing emails to be sent.

Domain Privacy can be purchased for $16.00 Inc GST per year/per domain. If you’d like to see if its available for your domain, add it to your domain or if you have further questions about Domain Privacy then please contact our Domain specialists using the form below or email sales@infinite.net.au.