Private registration

When you buy a domain, you choose a privacy setting. This setting determines how much of the personal contact information you provided when you registered your domain displays in a WHOIS lookup:

Privacy protection on: Does not provide your personal contact information
Privacy protection off: Provides some or all of your personal contact information.

However, depending upon the registry, parts of information (Organization name, address and email ID) in WHOIS may be published or redacted regardless of privacy protection status.

About privacy protection

Privacy protection helps you avoid spam and contact information abuse. With privacy protection on, when someone does a WHOIS lookup for your domain, they see alternate contact information provided by a third-party privacy provider. For example:

[encrypted_string]@example.com.[privacy_provider]
owner@example.com.[privacy_provider]

Using privacy protection means you agree to the terms of service for your third-party provider: Contact Privacy for domain endings where Google Domains is the registrar of record and WhoisProxy for domain endings where Key Systems is the registrar of record. To confirm your registrar of record, check the reference of domain ending details.

If your privacy protection is provided by Contact Privacy, email correspondence is forwarded by email, only if submitted via the https://contactprivacy.email website. If your privacy protection is provided by WhoisProxy, emails sent to the alternate email address are forwarded to the WHOIS email address you provided.

How to change your privacy setting

Some domain endings do not support privacy protection. To confirm if you can use private registration with your domain, check the reference of domain ending details.

You can change your privacy setting at any time. Follow these steps:

Open Google Domains.
In the left navigation, click My domains.
Select the name of the domain whose privacy setting you want to change.
Scroll to Privacy protection.
Select a privacy option:
- Privacy protection on (private registration).
- Privacy protection off (public registration)

Public registration for .com and .net domains

Domains that end in .com and .net automatically redact (or hide) some registration information in WHOIS lookups, even if you’re using public registration. By default, only the following information shows:

Organization name
State/province
Country

Proxy contact information

For TLDs .com or .net, if your WHOIS information is redacted, we generally provide you with a proxy email address, such as obrs8XXXlje@proxyregistrant.email for that domain. If someone wants to contact you about your domain, they can reach you via that email address.

Messages sent to your proxy email address are forwarded to the registrant contact email address you shared. You do not need to perform any steps to set up this email address or email forwarding. To view your proxy email address, perform a WHOIS lookup. Note that the proxy email address for each domain is dynamic and likely to change every 5 to 30 days.

How to show all your information publicly

With .com and .net domains, you have the option to publish all of your information. Follow these steps:

Change your privacy registration setting to Privacy protection off.
Select Publish your info in the WHOIS directory.
Select I agree on the consent dialog.