Why you should never use Whois privacy

You should never use Whois privacy if you consider the risk of not directly owning and controlling your domain names unacceptable. The other thing about Whois privacy, especially for e-commerce websites and companies doing business on the Internet, is that it tends to look "scammy." If you are taking people's credit card data or other Personally Identifiable Information (PII), you should be as transparent as possible and make it easy for users to look up exactly who they are doing business with. Few would disagree that in this context, anonymized Whois records may be off-putting to potential customers.

The problem is when the signup process for many domain registrations is so convoluted and oversaturated with "upsells" and "addons," in many cases Whois privacy may be enabled for your domains without the domain Registrants actually being aware of it.

Another caveat to using Whois privacy is that it can also be used (intentionally? Who knows?) to create lock-in situations. For people not immersed in this industry, transferring domains between Registrars can be a daunting task. It gets even harder when the domains have Whois privacy enabled.

When signing up a domain with a given registrar, adding Whois privacy is trivially easy (perhaps, too easy). It's just a checkbox! For your convenience, it may have already been checked.

Then when the time comes to transfer it out and turn it off, it's another story. Once you're at a point where you decide to transfer your domain to another Registrar (perhaps because of the stellar service?), you have to disable Whois privacy before you can transfer the domain out.

Usually, the Registrar creates a separate Privacy Entity. If they are nice about it, you have the ability to disable Whois Privacy from within the same control panel where you manage everything else. If they're not so nice about it, they may force you to contact the Privacy Entity separately to disable it, and that Privacy Entity may erect more hurdles, such as providing written authorization or photo ID.