intermediateLegal
GDPR and Domain Privacy
The EU privacy law that caused most registrars to hide registrant personal data from public WHOIS records.
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the EU data protection law that transformed WHOIS data availability starting in 2018. Under GDPR, registrars in the EU (and many globally adopting GDPR-compliant practices) must mask or redact registrant personal data in public WHOIS records. This makes it harder to identify domain owners for trademark enforcement, but ICANN has developed accreditation systems for legitimate access to redacted WHOIS data.