The Data Trade Off

There are a lot of great tools that can benefit domain investors. Some of these tools are made for domain investors and other tools weren’t specifically created for domain investors to use but can be extraordinarily helpful to us. One issue investors should keep in mind is that any data they input into these tools may be seen by the data providers and potentially associated parties.

I use third party tools for many things. I perform Whois lookups on domain names I am looking to buy and those I am researching. I check various metrics for domain names I own. I do research on prospective buyers for my domain names and domain names I want to buy. I have not built my own tools, so I use third party companies.

In addition to these tools, there are also various platforms where I input data. I use parking services and sales platforms. There are domain name management tools and landing page companies. There are tools for just about everything related to domain names and domain name business operations.

I don’t spend too much time reading privacy policies and terms of service. I would imagine most of the companies in the domain name space promise to not share data or otherwise use private data input by customers. Maybe this is just wishful thinking though. I am always wonder if data I input is being used and or monetized by the companies or its principals.

When I use a third party company for something, I always analyze the trade-off of giving up my proprietary data. DomainTools, for instance, pretty much knows the types of names I am searching for, although quite a bit of my research is blog-related. Intellium, for example, knows what kind of domain names I am seeking from expiry auctions. The value I get from these companies and others is worth the information I am providing to them.

Domain investors should keep this in mind when using a new tool or inputing information on a third party website. They should understand the data could be used by the company for various purposes. For most investors, this is not a big deal and will cause no harm or difficulty to them. That said, people should understand that they are giving up information, and even if the company is run by honest people today, that could change if the company is sold.

It’s something to keep in mind not only on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but also when using domain name tools.