But this is just downright creepy once the amusement wears off.

I’ve been planning on making my Google Voice number public, but not forwarding it so that all calls go straight to voicemail. I did have the GV Widget to leave me voicemail on my blog for a while, but nobody ever used it.

I probably talk on the phone 2 or 3 times a week, tops, including calling my Mom on Sundays.

^5 for that! Id like to see it happen too!

WHOIS privacy is a bit of a minefield – not providing your actual contact details is a breach of ICANN rules, no exception made for privacy service users, immediate loss of the domain in any UDRP case.

The UDRP process has become horribly corrupted, there is no mechanism to stop the commercially-driven arbitration forums from chasing ever higher claimant win percentages (their customers are the claimants – the guys who initiate the disputes – and claimants choose which forum to use based on these publicly updated figures) and, as such, the forums will use any excuse or technicality to hand a domain to a claimant. All sorts of domain collectors are taking advantage of this, there’s big money to be made, especially if the current owner has decent traffic.

Of course, the vast majority of domains used with WordPress.com would be worth too little to be in danger, but anything with a combined brand and SEO value of over a grand will increasingly be a target. A few high-profile losses, with your privacy service as the named reason, would be at worst a financial liability, at best a PR nightmare for Automattic.

That’s a really good point — many tech-savvy people put just as much information and more (their address) on their domain registration, including a self-professed privacy-conscious person like you. This is why I want to introduce private domain registration on WP.com.

I don’t think it’s stupid, it’s just a different understanding and expectation around privacy, in this case of phone numbers. I suspect this was either “didn’t know” or “didn’t care.”

Scoble has always had his cell phone number right in the sidebar of his blog — I’ve always thought it was pretty ballsy.

I bet none of those people even checked the privacy status of the group they posted their numbers to…

~Chey