In accordance with the policy approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the contact information a domain is registered with must be valid and up to date all the time. Plus, this info is freely visible on WHOIS lookup websites and while this may be OK for organizations, it may not be very convenient for individuals, since everyone can see their names and their personal email and postal addresses, especially in times when identity theft isn’t that infrequent. Because of this, registrar companies have introduced a service that conceals the details of their customers without modifying them. The service is called Whois Privacy Protection. If it is active, people will see the details of the registrar, not the domain owner’s, if they make a WHOIS search. The Whois Privacy Protection service is supported by all generic domain name extensions, but it is still not possible to hide your private info with some country-code ones.