[foresto]

Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majority of its useful namespace to squatters.

Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.

[KPGv2]

People running WHOIS against kylesmith.com might discover that it's owned by someone named Kyle Smith.

I'll actually offer my take: domain names under the US TLD are a shared, public good, and no one should be allowed to anonymously own a shared, public good.

[anonu]

There's almost no real privacy online in the US. When I search for my name my phone number and almost every address I've ever lived at it is publicly retrievable - on multiple sites. Even with a private WHOIS I get spam from various companies via my registrar asking to speak to me about making a website.

[rootusrootus]

You can get some of the major sources to remove you with a service like Optery [0]. Costs a few bucks, but if you let them work at it a few months you can drop the subscription and the effects will linger for a while before you start finding yourself on public databases again.

I used it myself and I have trouble finding information about myself, even with my inside knowledge. If someone is determined enough you probably can't really hide from them, especially if they have any connections to law enforcement or one of the big data sinks. But you can definitely make it harder for casuals.

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optery

[yieldcrv]

I just can't get myself to pay for this problem that's ultimately a failure of the government and relies on another corporation behaving with my data

fortunately I'm a California resident so looks like that government has passed a solution that's free, thanks for sharing that guys

[rootusrootus]

Eventually I hope other states like Oregon will get that, since they tend to copy California legislation. But in the meantime, I will pay a few bucks, because while it may be a failure of the government, I cannot wave a magic wand and fix that. But I can make the data itself go away for awhile.

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

Here in sweden, personal data such as name, address, income, birth date, personal number, car ownership, etc. is public by design.

I find it interesting how the view on this differs depending on country and what people are used to.

[yieldcrv]

The issue is the spam

All of our personal identification data is available, not by design, but it is available

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

What kind of spam is that? All my info is available online, but I don't really get much spam. Of course, I get spam to my email but my email address is everywhere (also by design) so that's no wonder.

[marysol5]

The one I do find interesting, is how the concept of "privacy" has changed in the internet realm.

It wasn't all that long ago I could look up anybody in my town (or any town really) in a big book, and get contact details for them. Unless they specifically opt-out.

But now that concept is seen as madness.

Now companies no longer even list phone numbers or e-mail addresses on their own websites!

[ZeWaka]

It's worth sitting down for an hour and filing a bunch of information redaction requests.

[edot]

Might help with phone numbers, but addresses are trivial to find and cannot be removed, if you own property in the United States. Every county publishes property records, searchable by name. Unless you own your house with an LLC, if someone knows or can guess the state you live in, they can 1) search on the property records website of the top 10 counties by population, and if that fails 2) expand to searching other counties until you pop up. Not sure how to mitigate this, other than the LLC method.

[ZeWaka]

Addresses can also be trivially found via voter records.

[EduardoBautista]

There are services that will submit this information to hundreds of sites for you.

I used incogni and it seemed to have a positive result.

https://incogni.com/

[bragr]

Or if you're in California: https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/

[Barbing]

Thank you! How’d you find out about this?

[bragr]

It was in the news when it went into effect at the beginning of the year.

[marysol5]

"And now a segue to our sponsor, offering a service utterly unique to the USA"

[NetMageSCW]

Yes, I have a 3 letter .us domain that I’ve had for a while. Hard to get a three letter domain in any other popular TLD.

[ranger_danger]

There are still many thousands of three-letter domains for (third-party) sale on .com/net/org though. Sedo.com lists a handful of .net domains that are under $100. Most are more than that though.

[foresto]

> for (third-party) sale

Many of us find it unethical to give money to scalpers.

> a handful of .net domains that are under $100

And this is why.

[coxley]

Yeah... my .com renewal lapsed due to an expired credit card, and it was snatched before I realized it. They've always wanted $2k for it.

Even if I was OK paying in principle, that's too much for a personal blog that gets one post every 4 years.

[marysol5]

I had a domain that I was just using for e-mail, just to catch everything and not link directly to me. Then lent the A record to host an archive of something, which got linked around a load of places. So had "SEO Value" suddenly.

Did the same, the renewal failed because the card had expired, and now squatters have been sat on it, probably getting all my spam and resetting my credentials on random websites for the last 10 years.

[account42]

Lesson for everyone else reading this is to not let your domains lapese. You can also pay ahead (up to 10 years for most registries) so there really is no excuse - and that tends to provide some protection from price hikes as well, or at least give you more time to react.

[Imustaskforhelp]

can't say .expert that its popular by any measure but I have https://use.expert

In my opinion, there are still some really great short domains available. I actually even know some but don't have the budget to buy them.

The thing with domains is also that they aren't one time, I mean I am happy paying for domains which are 20$ say once even (and this comes as someone frugal but I just love domains) but most of these domains cost quite a lot.

For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.

[account42]

.expert is a "new" TLD meaning that the operator can do more or less whatever they want and is not bound to the same ICANN rules as the gTLD operator(s) are. IMO nuTLDs are not appropriate for anything except joke sites.

> For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.

Well yes, that's exactly why we unfortunately need to pay rent for domains - otherwise speculators would just buy them all up even more than they already do.

[hungryhobbit]

From TFA:

Will WHOIS requests leak my address?

Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.

[xahrepap]

This is definitely not true for general .us domains.

I registered one a year or two ago. And assuming my normal default Whois privacy was being applied (I clicked through too fast. Wasn’t paying attention)

I noticed my mistake after the spam bots started hitting me up for their web design products.

[foresto]

That was clearly not true for domains directly under .us when I last read their rules, roughly a year ago.

I suppose it might be true for .city.state.us subdomains, but those fail my first criterion (they're not short), and are themselves a privacy hazard since they substantially narrow the search space for personal info about the domain owner. So it doesn't refute my criticism.

[lftl]

Hrmm... I just tried this from my personal .us domain I've had for 23 years and it shows all my info.

[yieldcrv]

you can literally write anything in the whois though

registrars have forwarded me ICANN notices about having info verification for 10 years and nothing happened

nothingburger

[ranger_danger]

> you can literally write anything in the whois though

It's still fraud though. And there are multiple ways that might trigger an investigation into the validity of your contact info, such as abuse reports, court cases or failing to renew. Some people with axes to grind have been known to get domains of people they don't like taken down just by complaining to the registrar.

[marysol5]

I have a .EU domain, of which I'm no longer eligible thanks to Brexit, but the WHOIS is just some junk to make it "valid".

[account42]

Sounds like a liability when you upset someone enough that they try to get you taken down.

[majorchord]

"you can literally drive as fast as you want on the highway"

[reaperducer]

you can literally write anything in the whois though

Can confirm.

I have a domain that's had outdated whois information since 2006. Nobody cares.

Even when it was up to date, it never got any spam, I suspect because the contact information was in a country that wasn't valuable to spammers.

[foresto]

Good luck in your gamble.

[righthand]

ICE getting 4th jobs enforcing WHOIS registration data soon.