Dear Swinogers.

I run a couple of .com and .ch domains, which are registered via Gandi.net

About one week ago, Gandi activated 'privacy protect' on my .com domains, hiding all my contact data in the whois output, without me asking them to do so. They sent an email though, that they would do so because of the GDPR.

I asked them how GDPR entitles them to do so, in my opinion the GDPR aims for more transparency and thus, this is contra productive.

Also, such domains usually quite quickly get a bad reputation as hiding the whois data is something the 'bad guys' do. Also it becomes a bit more difficult, to verify if a domain is legit or not to decide upon well crafted phishing emails. Or to contact the owner in case of security incidents.

I told Gandi about my concerns, but only got the reply that they were forced to hide whois contact information on all domains registered via their service because of GDPR. Having the contact data published now is optional and has to be activated manually by the domain owner.

This surely is not the case, as my .ch domains registered with gandi still show my complete contact.

So I asked Gandi for how the GDPR exactly forces them to hide their customer's whois data. I haven't got a reply to this yet.

So I wonder if somebody on this list knows the background why gandi acts this way and if other registrars do the same.

If I get the whois data for some well known domains like:

microsoft.com google.com swiss.com credit-suisse.com

NONE has 'privacy protect' activated.

Mit freundlichen Grüssen

-Benoît Panizzon-