Why is my personal info online?

Why do they publish personal info (whoIs)of the person who registered a domain name? Why is this allowed? I don't like that this info is out there for anybody to see.

 

Not sure for the exact why but many of the domain registrants will provide you with a "Whois guard" for a small fee which effectively makes the whois information point to the registration company and they protect the information for you, only providing it to genuine third parties for fraud reasons.

 

As a business owner, it shows your credibility as a company. I wouldn't feel comfortable dealing with company whose domain's whois shows 'Mr. Da Great' as the admin If the company's website doesn't list their address or phone numbers, you can use whois info to get hold of them.

Technically you *can* key in false data but that's against the rule.

 

you can also hide your personal info by turning on the private whois fearture
however, most of the domain registar ask money for the feature

 

I was getting a lot of junk mail from companies that scrape this info and want to sell you hosting/site services so I started to mistype my zip code to a zip code that doesn't exist. Now I have no junk mail.

 

Some registrars offer free private registration if you buy a certain number of items. This is what go daddy is doing right now.

 

When you register domains at namecheap, you get whoisguard free.
Any of my domains, run a whois and you aint going to find out about me, where I live, etc etc.

 

You could put a fake mailing address. I know somone who did this. You could also use a PO Box for the mailing address if you don't want to use your real address.

 

Godaddy give you free privacy when you register more than 5 domains i think, or $2/year per domain.