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Thanks, indeed, most here want to poke fun at me but internet privacy I hold quite highly.
The registering a wyoming llc seems overboard for my use case though?
As I said above, I been buying domains since 2010 and would always put random data in and no issues except for the couple of uk ones I had which I recall similar issues.
I don't really care about having a uk domain and thought it might not be a thing but would sooner buy a none uk domain, if it will avoid this crap, but still target uk traffic if I want to as I think marketing is more important than a little tld at the end.
This is the first time I used netim so no other domains, and seems it will be the last.
I just chose it after going through a range of suggestions since the layout seemed simple and oldschool without all the other bloated bells and whistles modern gui and such like some others. I guess there are other basic ones though without this kyc crap - which I had no idea about beforehand.
Internetbs has been my main guys over the years and no such problems with them except maybe once when they had a crackdown to force them to comply to clean up their act but even then they stayed easy going.
I simply wanted to try a different registrar to not have all my domains on one and this project is quite different from the others so wanted to separate them. Made me like internetbs all the more though. It should be internetNObs
Then accept your fate like a real non-binary!
don't tell anybody but i've always done this too for unimportant domains, never had an issue but i don't risk it with commercial domains of course. never done it with .uk though.
i'm from an older set though, before people started putting all their info out on the internet for the entire universe to parse.
I don't think i've read this sentence on LET like ever before
Well, registering a company in a jurisdiction that doesn't publish ownership records (like Wyoming for example) is actually a pretty solid and not overly expensive (Wyoming and similar locations aren't the Seychelles or Belize after all) way to hide your data. Once registered the company is a fully functioning legal entity (read: can for example buy and own domains) but there's no way for people to find out who's behind it so you are effectively hidden and if you ever get the need to do so you can still prove ownership (of the company and therefore indirectly of anything the company owns).
The tax part depends on your local tax laws. Like i said, if you are British you might be lucky there (i think, no guarantees - i'm neither Brititish nor an accountant) and your local tax authorities just won't care about what you do outside of the UK. If for example i were to register a company in Wyoming (or really anywhere) though i would have to declare that and depending on how they judge the activity/status/etc of said company there might be a whole lot of headache and additional paperwork involved even if the company isn't making any money at all.
I get that and actually i fully agree with you. Guarding your personal data is a good thing. It's just that fake data (even though it's easy and cheap) is not the ideal approach to do that. Outside of situations like this one there is times when you actually want to be able to prove ownership of domains/accounts/whatever and fake data always runs into a brick wall there. Also with fraud checks getting more and more aggressive the amount of instances where you get stuff blocked due to sketchy data is likely just going to increase.
I think .uk is somewhat special. Not to long ago i almost bought a couple .uk and when Namecheap/Spaceship (not a fan of registry based privacy at all...) refused to provide whoisguard i briefly considered the nonsense data approach but it very much seemed like Nominet would try to verify whatever i send them and likely request documents if they can't. Sure, using data of a real (and therefore verifiable) person might have been an option but that's just a big no-no in my opinion, so i binned the idea.
"i violated the rules to 'protect' my privacy, and now i want everyone to feel bad for me because they took my domain away"
no one fault is thay you're paranoid. general whois privacy is generally enough. no one at registry level is going to give your data willy-nilly. if you did something so controversial, even if your fake detail thing passed; it wouldn't save you from the cops either lol.
Yeah, perfect use of a PO box
Edit: Nevermind, I googled it and I was wrong.
Anthony
What registrars have you found you can 'get away' with this?
The domain/s would not be important until they might start to get traffic and then become important so I would hope there is a 'get out' if the time ever came I have to. This one did not have time to become important.
I can say the 2 very important domains (.com) I have I have done this and touch wood have not been asked to verify them.
Seems better to just stick to .com, or any other none geo specific tld, though from the prevailing responses regarding .uk. The tiny bonus one might get for SEO/people trusting a .uk tld seems dwarfed by all the extra legal responsibilities that tld brings.
For once we agree on something. Also, lol, your use of 'set' in this context does betray a more wisened soul.
Why people here don't do backups? I must say I have not been the best at it on sites in the past but then I rarely updated them once I set the basic ones up and was more into marketing.
I just started with 'best foot forward' for this new forum.
Yea but it depends whether the registrars give you an out if the fake details become an issue down the line. As I recall during the internetbs pharma crackdown some years ago they were forced to do audits yet they can you the opportunity to amend the data to something real rather than ban unless you verify the fake data.
So depends whether whichever registrar do a 'one strike and you're out' policy and also whether even if it happened how much bother it would be to just start again. Risk vs reward of the simplicity of putting fake data.
Your Wyoming suggestion sounds a good idea if I were wanting to be building a company which would be making money or otherwise wanted to be a legit thing which would have some kind of air of authenticity or public face but these are just a couple of hobby/interest domains so don't see any cause for that and even if a domain got blocked for a certain domain if I had gotten some traffic I don't think it would be that much of an issue to just buy another and point existing and future users to the new one.
So still seems worth it I think.
Not. becuase PO boxes are expensive and as I have stated this is not a money making thing so I don't want to invest money in something what is just a personal project which is white hat anyway so do not need to pay for privacy.
On perusing other suggestions, fake data is still the way, just do it on registrar/tld they won't take issue with it.
Well, let's just say that it usualy goes more like this: "OMG, host X has locked my account/lost my data/whatever they are so horrible!", "Well, that sucks. Not much you can do though, so just restore elsewhere.", "But i need my data!! I'm losing millions! Mimimi...", [insert-5-page-meltdown-here]
Yeah, old internetbs used to be 1500% zero fucks given though. Might be hard to find anything with that level of don't-care these days but then that doesn't mean you can't try. I'm also not entirely sure what happens when someone uses the official channels for reporting wrong owner data and the whole thing gets initiated from the registry side. Maybe the registrar can still adjust data in that case but i've never seen the whole thing play out.
Well, if it's a calculated risk to you then that's obviously fine. Kind of like with backups people often times aren't that realistic about things.
Hmm now you mention it I did read something concerning about current internetbs that it was actually bought out by a UK company!!! which is why they got tighter on such things, but touch wood have not had any issues with my .com domains with them since the initial request for a real email contact some years ago.
Oh yea and another route I was thinking was that my main gripe with not giving my real info is not trusting some far off company to store my data responsibly.
One thing UK at least has been praised for is their data protection - not sure if rightly or wrongly but generally read that is a strong point of the UK - so I thought maybe I could go the other way and just register with a reputable looking UK registrar and give them all they ask for knowing they would be held to a higher standard on the data protection side of things which they would be expected to comply with.
I did see a nice looking small UK hosting/registrar recommended in one of my other threads which seemed to have good reviews and not one of these faceless massive corporations like namecheap or whatnot. Somewhere you would actually expect to get through to customer services in house.
Understandably. In the end nothing is 100% safe though. I mean, companies like Hetzner had data leaks and they probably weren't just throwing it around carelessly. That obviously doesn't make it wrong to do the best you can to avoid it but the possibility is always there.
In general if you shop around the internet it's pretty much bound to happen one day but it's also not the end of the world. My data has probably been leaked multiple times by now and has been out there for many year. Bottom line: Nothing. Sure, i'd rather have it not be there at all but that's not really something i can decide at this point and in the end there just isn't that much someone can do with a bunch of contact information besides maybe sending personalized spam (and i haven't even gotten that yet).
I don't know about the UK specifically but Europe in general is probably your best bet. At least on paper GDPR (no idea if the UK still follows it or if they have moved on to do their own thing after Brexit) provides a fair amount of rights, expectations and (theoretically - from what i've seen it tends to be a very slow process...) punishment for companies violating it and adjacent countries like Switzerland or Liechtenstein often times built up a lot of reputation around privacy.
They still have the GDPR. When the UK broke off from the rest of the EU, many of the laws were basically just forked from EU laws. There are some minor differences but it's conceptually the same.
Yeah, them basically being EU-light without actually being in the EU was also pretty much the impression i got. I just had a vague memory of there being some kind of grace period in relation to GDPR but if they basically just renamed it to GDPR-UK it obviously doesn't really matter.
UK data protection is pretty shit. Ok on paper it looks neat but on practice...just ask any HR person to check their inbox, you will find a lot of interesting things. Most of them never heard of encryption and do not even know that emailing documents using Outlook is inherently insecure and not very private. But well yeah they are praised...by someone god knows who.
Ok so I emailed netim asking how I can move the domain and they seem to be holding it ransom stating that I must validate the details before I move it.
So they can just keep it for how long? the whole year until it would be released at the end of the year I paid for?
I will just abandon that domain if so.
If your fake details ended up with Nominet (i mean, we still don't know whose initiative this actually is) you won't get around the verification anyways - even if you managed to move the domain.
They can do pretty much whatever they want since fake detail personas can't sue them. Depending on applicable laws providing fake details without intention to defraud might not be illegal but in any case as long as you don't reveal your real identity you have no legal ground to stand on, so it's pretty much up to them.
Probably your best option at this point.
So they double down their KYC shit, right?
Netim you are so naughty, this is for you
if they let you move it with questionable info it sort of defeats the purpose of kyc so i'd be very surprised it a move was allowed (just from a common sense angle).
even if you fixed the info (and they let you) is it now on some list of shady shit that's going to trigger repeated issues for the rest of the life of the domain? i'm not saying that's so, but these are things i'd wonder.
i don't know what their policy is on keeping invalid info domains locked, but you violated the terms so consider it a donation and move on with life. domain with fake reg info = throwaway.
opinions, obviously.