Enabling or disabling privacy protection for contact information for a domain
When you register a domain with Amazon Route 53 or transfer a domain to Route 53, we enable privacy protection by default for all the contacts for the domain. This typically hides most of your contact information from WHOIS ("Who is") queries and reduces the amount of spam that you receive. When you enable privacy protection, your contact information is replaced with contact information for the registrar or with the phrase "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY", or "On behalf of <domain name> owner."
If you choose to disable privacy protection, you must disable it for all contacts for a domain. If you do disable privacy protection, anyone can send a WHOIS query for the domain and, for most top-level domains (TLDs), might be able to get all the contact information that you provided when you registered or transferred the domain, including name, address, phone number, and email address. The WHOIS command is widely available; it's included in many operating systems, and it's also available as a web application on many websites.
If you are transferring a domain to another registrar, and privacy protection is enabled for the domain contacts, the email to verify the transfer will be delivered from identity-protect.org addresses for TLDs registered with Amazon Registrar. To determine who the registrar is for your TLD, see Finding your registrar.
The information that you can hide from WHOIS queries depends on two main factors:
- The registry for the top level domain
Most TLD registries hide all contact information automatically, some allow you to choose to hide all contact information, some allow you to hide only some information, and some do not allow you to hide any information.
When privacy protection on a domain is enabled, your contact information is replaced either with contact information for the privacy protection service, or with the phrase "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY." The privacy protection service applies spam prevention features (address rotation and SPF/DKIM/spam analysis) and will, in most cases, automatically forward emails passing these filters. However, it is not advisable to send critical emails to privacy protected email addresses because the spam mechanism might prevent them from being forwarded.
Additionally, the choice of which privacy protection mechanism is used for a domain is not configurable and is auto-selected by the system. The contact detail for our privacy protection service can't be manually updated.
Note
To enable or disable privacy protection for some domains, you must open a support case and request privacy protection. For more information, see the applicable section in Domains that you can register with Amazon Route 53:
- The registrar
-
When you register a domain with Route 53 or transfer a domain to Route 53, the registrar for the domain is either Amazon Registrar or our registrar associate, Gandi. Amazon Registrar and Gandi hide different information by default:
Amazon Registrar – By default, all of your contact information is hidden. However, regulations for the TLD registry take precedence.
Gandi – By default, all of your contact information is hidden except organization name, if any. However, regulations for the TLD registry take precedence.
For geographic TLDs that don't allow privacy protection, your personal information will be marked as "redacted" on the Whois Directory Search
page on the Gandi website. However, your personal information might be available at the domain registry or on third-party WHOIS websites.
To find out what information is hidden for the TLD for your domain, see Domains that you can register with Amazon Route 53.
When you want to enable or disable privacy protection for a domain that you registered using Route 53, perform the following procedure.
To enable or disable privacy protection for contact information for a domain
Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Route 53 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/route53/
. In the navigation pane, choose Registered domains.
Choose the name of the domain that you want to enable or disable privacy protection for.
In the Contact information section, choose Edit.
In the Privacy protection section, choose whether to hide contact information. You must specify the same privacy setting for all four contacts: admin, registrant, technical, and billing.
Note
If privacy protection isn't supported for your TLD, the Privacy protection section isn't displayed.
Choose Save changes.
-
If you encounter issues while enabling or disabling privacy protection, you can contact AWS Support for free. For more information, see Contacting AWS Support about domain registration issues.
