I am in the hunt right now for a domain (I plan to use for email and such, meaning, things that would be tied to my legal person). As some of you know, by law in many places it is required to have a set of legally true information to register a domain (from name to house address, in case the domain needs to be verified to belong to a real person).

I was checking porkbun a second ago, and the privacy policy really does not give me confidence (they mention very clearly there is sale and ai training involved). I am from Europe so I would expect gdpr to be respected by default, however, they say I would have to send an email to get my rights and identify myself (I expect an Id upload which is not really a thing I want to do).

Considering all this, what are the better places for domains? I expect to pay more than porkbun, but if it people that do it right, so be it.

I use Strato, and from what I can tell they are pretty good about privacy and such.

https://www.strato.de/

Domain registrars do id verification now? I'm also in Europe and the mail is only for sending me the reminder to pay

Cloudflare are my go to. Mostly because they sell at cost though, don't have to worry about being shafted on renewals. https://www.cloudflare.com/domains/

When you send an email stating you want to exercise your gdpr rights, more often than not the companies asks for an identification of some sort. I've seen in multiple threads on other services that when that happens is common to ask for an Id. Which actually creates a chilling effect, making people less likely to go with the gdpr enforcement. So by default they don't ask for anything, but the language implies the capability is there in case the gdpr clause is brought up

I will check once I get the chance. Thanks!

I didn't check cloudflare yet, but I will need to double check their policies. Although I do know domain names and renewal shafting are a known problem

I would caution against Cloudflare, that's American stuff

You will not find anything more privacy oriented than Njalla.

dum queston: why do u (not you sfecficaly just someone in general) need a domain

Some people like to have their own domain for email. Like @lastname.com

njal.la

Alibaba, The Chinese are the most trustworthy.

Just learned they support Omarchy. Fucking shit.

emails mostly, so you don't depend on any provider, and you can have unique email for every account you create, so if one is getting spam on you can just filter all email send to it and you know who sold your data or got a breach

wow

fingerprting related question: does this make you more unique?

example "lol some weirdo is using his own domain on multiple websties and not gmail i bet these emails are the same guy"

That and they're right wing, libertarian pro-pedo garbage

Like "8chan is fine by us" levels of 🤮

Most do now, When I swapped from namecheap to porkbun they id checked me. It was surprising

not really more than using just one e-mail for all account

but it's not a way to reduce online fingerprint yes, for this there is alias providers

ok just asking if it increases fingerprint ill try it

Check out incognet.io. You can buy a domain and pay for it with Monero.

And you do not have to give information about yourself. You are identified as incognit user, and then the company's street address.

With that said, you don't actually own the domain because it is in their name with their street address, so it's mainly a for-benefit of type arrangement where the company actually owns it, and then they allow you to use it. As I said, you can pay with Monero, and the only thing you have to give them is an email address and a password, and they accept alias email addresses.

I've always struggled while drafting how to reduce email fingerprinting.
I know so few reliable alias providers, and many of those end up on blocklists. I've been considering a layered approach with a domain tied to my real life identity, and aliases for things not tied into my real self, but I'm not sure how to solve things satisfactorily.

Probably a more common use case for webapps, but agree.

If you want to actually “get” a domain name from icann, you are required to give them identifying information. There is no way around that. Except for the part at the end of this reply.

You can go through incognito or njalla and maybe even someone else, but at that point it’s “their” domain and you’re just renting it. The difference may matter for your purposes. Think critically about what you are trying to avoid and accomplish.

It’s not clear to me what you as a self identifying European expect to accomplish by not verifying your id with a group that asks for it in order to comply with the privacy law you imply you’d prefer to have the protections of. This is another area where I would encourage you to think critically about what you’re trying to accomplish and what material conditions surround you.

If you don’t want to do all that, just break the law. There’s a bigass database of ids from a breach of some company that does in person id scanning. Each one is a few bucks and you could easily pose as one of those people.

Cloudflare is one of the largest surveillance operations in the world. They might not directly sell your data, but they are absolutely in a position to exploit your data and track your behavior. They should be avoided if privacy is a concern.

The catch there is that you don't technically own the domain, instead they do, right?

So if it becomes valuable they can sell it from under you with no issues.

Recent? Never asked for one when switched to porkbun a couple years ago.

yea a few months ago

As far as I know technically you never own a domain, it's a delegation. You might be right that they do some legal maneuvering to avoid having to collect technically required contact details, but the end result is that they do not have any info to give away even if the legal protection layer "fails".

Isn't every registrar "just renting" domains? What is the pragmatic difference between regular registrars and "proxy" ones from the perspective of a registrant?

What indeed!

Why what stops law enforcement from simply telling dns providers, with the force of a judges order behind them, that “your” domain should point to their servers which proclaim it to have been seized, or which clandestinely record the comings and goings of “your” visitors?

Has this ever happened in the past, and if so, what resources and mechanisms were put into play to accomplish it? Is this series of events a concern of yours?

These questions and more, not answered by me!

Any domain can be put on serverHold or redirected, and recently that has happened on autistici.org without even a court order. Seems to me like "owning" a domain the usual way offers no additional guarantees or benefit

When you register domain in a normal way, you are assigned to be the domain administrator and entered into WHOIS. For the year lease, the domain name is yours, and your registrar cannot take it down unless they have the legal reason to. You can also transfer your domain to another registrar.

Proxy registrars like Njalla keep ownership of the domain, keep themselves in WHOIS and can take your domain back for any reason at any point, because it's actually theirs. You also cannot move it to other registrars for the same reason.

Right. They keep the ownership of the domain and service it to you. They can revert it and bar your access any time for any reason.

Few reasons I can think of:

• Proper SSL support
• Reachability of networks with dynamic IPv4 (through dynamic DNS)
• Running own email server (needs the domain)
• Actually running a site for someone to visit
• Basic convenience

I use porkbun, connected to Proton for email.
Porkbun itself only handles DNS requests, so I dont think there's any data there. I suppose they could monitor which hosts are requesting my email?

They wouldn't know if it's one email account or hundreds, though.

I would expect Njalla would be better, but I've never used them myself

Yeah, that is possible. That's the risk you take, though, by wanting to be so private with a system that's not meant for privacy.

If you want true privacy you control, go create yourself an .onion domain.

Hey, we partner with Faivelo for email. Very dependable, includes read receipts, and unlimited mailboxes priced by storage so we only pay for what we use. Solid customer experience.