Did you know that your name, email, and phone number are made publicly available on the internet, within the WHOIS database, when you register almost any domain name? Any spammers, solicitors and other prying eyes can find your personal information online, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

If you have registered a UK domain and you are not using your domain for business, you can apply to have your personal details kept out of the public's eyes, but if you are a business, you are obliged to have your registration details made public. For this reason, if for example you are working from home, you may want to consider using a PO Box address.

For some international domains, there is another solution, ID Protect. This will effectively cloak your details and replace them with the ID protect information. This service cost £12.50 per year and is only available for the following domains' extensions: com, net, org, biz, info and tv.

ID Protect provides proxy information instead of your personal contact information. Parties who want to contact you use the proxy information, and the messages are forwarded to you.

The domain name WHOIS database is a principal source of email addresses for spammers. If your domain name has ID Protect, the contact email address used by ID protect for your domain is changed several times a year. Spammers harvest and use one WHOIS email address, but once it is changed, that source of spam is cut off.

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