According to the policies approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the contact information a domain is registered with must be correct and up to date all the time. Furthermore, this info is publicly visible on WHOIS sites and while this may be OK for organizations, it may not be very acceptable for individuals, since everybody can view their names and their personal home and email addresses, all the more so in an age when identity theft isn’t that atypical. For this reason, domain registrars have introduced a service that hides the details of their customers without editing them. The service is referred to as Whois Privacy Protection. In case it’s active, people will see the details of the registrar, not the domain owner’s, if they do a WHOIS lookup. The Whois Privacy Protection service is supported by all generic domain name extensions, but it’s still impossible to hide your private details with some country-code ones.
