AboutUs and DomainTools makes your whois Google-able

[Ms Naughty]

When I heard there were 3 other people in the town with the same name, I googled myself and the town name to see what would come up.

Unfortunately what did appear in the search results were several Whois listings for my domain names, complete with full name and address. These have been scraped from registrars and now appear on numerous sites like About Us, DomainTools, DomainQuery etc

This has kind of pissed me off. I was OK with having my real name on a domain registry since you had to make an effort to look it up. But with these sites coming up in Google, it's a whole lot easier for someone to stumble across my "real" identity. Not that I've hidden it terribly well, but still. Am I being unreasonable in feeling grumpy about this?

You can login and edit the Wikis of these sites. Problem is they've scraped a whole bunch of my domains.

They also happily steal your search terms.

Here's what About Us says about removing your address information:

Removing Your Address And Contact Information

* Simply log in, click the "edit" link, make your changes, and save them. If you require further help with this please contact us. One of the features of a wiki is that the historical information is retained. If you need the history removed for some reason, please email from an email address at the domain name in question and ask that we do so. We will be happy to take care of removing the history.
o As a note, domain ownership contact information (Whois) is publicly available at a number of other sites.
o In addition to this site, if you would like to prevent your information from showing up anywhere else, you may wish to contact your domain name registrar and purchase a privacy service which most of the majors domain name registrars have. That doesn't deal with historical information which may already be out there, but at least it deals with it on a go forward basis.

[whitey]

Domain Tools has been out there for quite awhile and this has been possible - not sure when they actually converted from whois.sc to domiantools.com.

It happens to be a very good site with a veritable treasure trove of information for those in the domain business. The downside is that it is possible to look up registry histories going back in to the last decade.

The whole privacy thing if you are in the adult business is difficult to manage. I have a mainstream business that has outside investors that invest in web businesses and are quite saavy about researcing their portfolio companies' leadership online history, and porn involvement will most often bounce you out of a final review no matter how strong the business plan. There are a rash of other issues that come with the whole public whois thing as well.

On the other hand, link lists and some other people in the adult business are not unreasonable to expect that they know who they are dealing with as it is not a good return on their time to continually deal with a raft of anonymus people who at best waste their time and at worst cause invasive problems to their customers and guests.

Having recently decided to be more active in adult again after a couple of years of non-engagement, this is an issue that I have been grappling with. At this moment, I have decided to set up a separate company at a different address for my adult business, and allow that to become my brand name. It is going to take me a couple of more weeks to complete the process, but it is the best solution that I could come up with to retain credibility in both worlds. The expense of setting up a new company is not large (the accounting at year-end is a bit more for an independent operator), there are some people starting to operate third party 2257 docs holders so inspections should not be a problem (but they cost a bit), and the benefits are keeping your name clean for any mainstream business you may do (for the culturally conservative noobs) and preventing some of the other more untoward things that periodically happen to adult webmasters as a result of public whois.

[secretagentwilly]

yeah, I first noticed this sometime ago...i'm just waiting for the day when someone or one of my coworkers at my real job connects the dots and calls me out...it's nothing illegal so I'm not worried about that, but sometimes I wonder if it'll affect my upward mobility in the company...bottom line for me is that I shouldn't be doing anything I wouldn't want the whole world to know about...so I'm cool with it...