The simple act of registering a domain opens yourself up to alot of privacy issues. In it’s basic form, it allows people to harvest your email address for spamming. It doesn’t take alot of imagination to figure out how much further hackers can take it (socially-engineered hacking, identity theft, etc).
As demonstration of how readily available this information is, let’s look at who owns wandering.com. You’ll see that it is registered to Murat in Istanbul with his Yahoo email address, phone and fax numbers. Compare that to wandering.net’s records. All my details are hidden behind NameCheap’s WhoisGuard. I’m sure that my information is not perfectly secure, but at least it’s an added layer of protection.
I always get similar privacy protection for all domains that I register. When I was with GoDaddy I used their “Domains By Proxy” service (an “added value” aka “charge you more money” service). NameCheap’s WhoisGuard is free (for now). It doesn’t matter who you register with, but I’d always recommend buying the privacy service (now you know why)!
bill