In accordance with the policy approved by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the contact info a domain is registered with must be valid and accurate all the time. In addition, this info is freely accessible on WHOIS lookup websites and while this may be okay for companies, it may not be very convenient for individuals, because everybody can see their names and their personal street and email addresses, all the more so in an age when identity theft is not that infrequent. That is the reason why domain name registrars have come up with a service that hides the details of their clients without changing them. The service is called Whois Privacy Protection. If it is active, people will see the details of the domain registrar, not those of the domain owner, if they make a WHOIS search. The Whois Privacy Protection service is supported by all generic TLD extensions, but it’s still impossible to hide your private info with certain country-code extensions.
