In accordance with the policy approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the contact info a domain is registered with must be valid and up to date all the time. In addition, this information is openly available on WHOIS web sites and while this may be OK for companies, it may not be very convenient for individuals, since anyone can view their names and their personal street and email addresses, especially in times when identity theft isn’t that rare. This is the reason why domain registrars have launched a service that conceals the details of their clients without changing them. The service is referred to as Whois Privacy Protection. If it’s enabled, people will view the details of the registrar, not the domain owner’s, if they make a WHOIS inquiry. The Whois Privacy Protection service is supported by all generic top-level domain name extensions, but it is still not possible to hide your personal info with some country-code extensions.