I get a ton of robocalls and spam text messages offering discounts and promo codes for web design, logo design, and web development services. This spam is annoying and can be time consuming to deal with, but I am accustomed to it because my Whois information is public. Some people seem to blame their domain registrar for this spam, but I believe it is usually done by third parties who contact registrants of recently purchased domain names.
I recently came across a post on LinkedIn that essentially accused GoDaddy of selling their information. The person who wrote the LinkedIn article/comment said he believed that GoDaddy sold his information and he was now being contacted by other companies offering their services to him. In a subsequent comment this person mentioned that his domain name was privately registered. I did not follow up with this person, nor did I verify anything he had written to learn more details about his situation.
From my perspective, it would not make sense for GoDaddy to sell its customer information to third parties because the company offers many of these services already. Even in a situation where GoDaddy did not offer a particular type of service, it would not make sense for the company to sell customer data because third parties could conceivably try to win other business from GoDaddy by offering domain registration, hosting, web development, or other high margin services that GoDaddy offers its customers. Selling customer data seems like it would entail far greater risk than reward.
To get to the bottom of this, I reached out to