The European data protection authorities have expressed concern over the unlimited publication of personal data of domain name registrants in the WHOIS. To ensure WHOIS output is compliant with the GDPR, starting May 25th, 2018 following changes will be implemented to WHOIS data for gTLD domains:
For Existing Domain Names:
- For all existing domain names, if either of the Registrant, Admin, Tech and/or Billing contacts is identified as being from the EU, the WHOIS output will be masked for that domain name with placeholder details in place of the users’ personal information (this service will be referred to as “GDPR WHOIS Protection”).
- All domain names that have Whois Privacy enabled (which is a separate service from GDPR WHOIS Protection), will continue to show the Whois Privacy Protection contact details in the WHOIS output. In addition Whois Privacy Protection provides the following services and functionality which are not available with GDPR WHOIS Protection:
- WHOIS Privacy Protection enables registrant to get emails like domain sale inquiries if needed from the website http://privacyprotect.org/; and
- WHOIS Privacy Protection allows the registrant to receive emails from a web form on the privacyprotect.org website.
For New Domain Registrations, Renewals, Transfers:
- All domain registrations and transfers will use the details from the customer contact created during the purchase flow or all the 4 contacts: Admin, Billing, Technical and Registrant contact.
- The customer can log in to our control panel and change the default contact or edit any of the 4 contacts
- If any of these contacts created / selected at the time of domain registration are from within the EU region, GDPR WHOIS Protection will be enabled for the Domain name by default during the purchase process. GDPR WHOIS Protection will work exactly as explained above
- However, they still have the choice of layering Privacy Protection over GDPR WHOIS protection in order to receive emails like sale notices.
- WHOIS data for EU customers will always be masked regardless of whether or not Privacy Protection is enabled
