In accordance with the policies approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the contact information a domain is registered with must be valid and accurate at all times. At the same time, this info is publicly accessible on WHOIS web sites and while this may be OK for organizations, it may not be very convenient for individuals, since everyone can view their names and their personal email and postal addresses, especially in times when identity fraud isn’t that infrequent. That is the reason why domain name registrars have introduced a service that hides the details of their customers without changing them. The service is referred to as Whois Privacy Protection. If it is active, people will see the details of the domain registrar, not the domain owner’s, if they perform a WHOIS lookup. The Whois Privacy Protection service is supported by all generic top-level domain name extensions, but it’s still not possible to conceal your personal information with some country-code ones.
