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 up to date all the time. In addition, this info is openly available on WHOIS websites and while this may be OK for companies, it may not be very convenient for individuals, since everybody can see their names and their personal home and email addresses, especially in times when identity theft is not that rare. This is the reason why domain name registrars have introduced a service that hides the details of their clients without altering them. The service is referred to as Whois Privacy Protection. If it’s activated, people will view the details of the registrar company, not the domain owner’s, if they do a WHOIS search. The Whois Privacy Protection service is supported by all generic top-level domain name extensions, but it is still impossible to conceal your personal info with some country-code ones.