He didn’t use whois privacy. Most people don’t.
Sean Spicer has made plenty of enemies in his short time as White House Press Secretary. And now, thanks to some domain names he registered long ago, people have a way to contact him about it.
As Mashable wrote yesterday, Spicer registered domain names and didn’t initially opt for Whois privacy. He appears to have used a home address and personal phone number.
Mashable blames Spicer for being cheap and not wanting to pay an extra eight bucks a year for Whois privacy. But is this really about cost or is it about knowledge?
GoDaddy (where SeanSpicer.com is registered) and other registrars have made their pitches for whois privacy and proxy services more upfront in recent years. In fact, it’s front and center as an option for your domain in GoDaddy’s shopping cart now. At the same time, registrars are pitching so many cross-sells that it can be easy to overlook this.
Whois is also something that most domain registrants don’t understand. They don’t realize that their information is literally in an open address book.
Chris says
Why do we call ourselves civilized? Does it matter if a domain is registered with a non private information? If you pass by a house with its door ajar, is it an invitation to trespass or steal?
Joseph Peterson says
@Chris,
Is someone trespassing or stealing? Sounds more like having a phone number listed publicly in the phone book … then becoming famous and getting a lot of phone calls as a result.
Must be a nuisance. Still, any celebrity – liked or disliked – is going to experience something unpleasant like this. Not to excuse it; but, I mean, he should have seen this coming.
Surely there’s a privacy check list for high-profile government officials like members of congress or the spokesman for Donald Trump. Ringo Starr – not a noted cybersecurity expert – has been able to manage his personal privacy since the 1960s
Jane Doe says
Your door analogy is irrelevant.
This is the internet.
Make yourself a target and some troll somewhere is going to have some fun at your expense.
The more people that dislike you, the greater the inconvenience to you.
A Mitchell says
Privacy is an obsolete concept—Sean Spicer, apparently.
“No, I don’t care if they come to my house.”
Mark Risman says
This is very frustrating — I registered a domain last week and it was the first time I did this so I didn’t realize what would happen. All this week I’ve been getting phone calls and e-mails from all sorts of creepy folks offering me web design services and whatever else.
Two days after I registered it I added the privacy services. You think that would have solved it, but I noticed that sites like wa-com.com (and others) still post my information even though it is now gone from whois. Wouldn’t that be considered a misuse of WHOIS?
And with wa-com.com it gets even better. They offer a link to update your domain information on their site — as long as you first like them on Facebook or link them on Google+: http://wa-com.com/public%20domain%20update%20form
Anyone know how to solve this? This really seems like a problem that should have already been solved.
Miroslav Glavić says
I have a P.O. Box address and use a free voicemail number.
I even use one @gmail.com address JUST FOR DOMAIN REGISTRATION. I haven’t used my personal gmail for domain registrations for a long time now.