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Comment by ploggingdev | Hacker News Reader

Tangent : what happens to the whois guard if I want to transfer a domain between providers (eg- namecheap to google)? I've heard that during the transfer the whois guard has to be disabled. This means that services such as Domain Tools will log the whois data. Is this true? If so, is there any way to transfer a domain between providers while keeping contact details out of the public whois database?

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I had to transfer domains once (from WordPress to Namecheap) and the instructions explicitly required disabling the privacy guard. It was only needed for the transfer period, which was about 3 days. I would love to know why the process requires it.

Now that this is mentioned, I revisited WordPress' instructions page and it says: "Most domain names registered at WordPress.com have GDPR protection, which means registrant contact information is not visible publicly, regardless of whether or not the domain has Privacy Protection in place. For these domains, disabling privacy will not result in contact info being publicly published."[0] Does this mean the process doesn't really need it but they registrars require it for some odd reason? If they can work it out without disabling privacy feature to comply with GDPR, why can't they do the same for everyone?

[0] https://en.support.wordpress.com/move-domain/transfer-domain...

In my experience you can usually pre-enable whois guard equivalents during the checkout process for the transfer.

From the Domain Tools point of view the transfer should look like Old Whois Privacy LLP on SomeRegistrar transferred a domain to New Whois Privacy Corp on NewRegistrar

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