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From Customer Email
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Follow-up via email about the privacy registration. Remember, it doesn’t hurt to do a private registration if you are more comfortable with that. I just tend to be very practical and realistic about things.
(1) When you register a domain name, the information that you use is entered into the WHOIS database. This information serves a number of purposes, but is primarily used to contact the registrant of a domain or IP address.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whois
(2) The information that is displayed on a WHOIS query is no more than is publicly available from any phone book, whitepages.com, or any other publicly available database. Therefore, there is NO risk of identity theft through this information.
(3) The most important thing to remember is to use a strong password for your domain account login. Periodically login to your domain account and check the contact information, etc. Loss of your domain can possibly destroy your business.
(4) For ID theft to happen, someone needs to have authentication information – such as account login/password, SSN, security question/answers, etc. You name, address, and phone number don’t usually qualify. This same information is available on any check that have ever written – plus your bank name, account number, and routing number.
(5) You are 1000x more likely to be an ID theft victim if you write a check to a cashier and put your SSN or DL number on the check. This type of scamming is more prevalent than you think.
(6) You can use “false information” as the registrant; however, ICANN frowns upon this. At any rate, you need to make sure that your contact information can be verified in the future in case there is any sort of dispute with your domain name. I have encountered plenty of situations with clients where they did not have control of their domain and it was very tough to get control back.
http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/wdrp.htm
Hacking and Credit Cards
http://smartergeekcom.wpengine.com/blog/2008/12/hacking-and-credit-cards.asp
About Encrypting Your Data – Again
http://smartergeekcom.wpengine.com/blog/2009/01/about-encrypting-your-data-again.asp