In accordance with the policies approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the contact information a domain name is registered with must be valid and up to date all the time. Moreover, this information is publicly available on WHOIS sites and while this may be okay for organizations, it may not be very acceptable for individuals, because everyone can see their names and their personal home and email addresses, especially in times when identity fraud isn’t that atypical. This is why domain name registrars have come up with a service that hides the details of their customers without altering them. The service is called Whois Privacy Protection. If it’s active, people will see the details of the registrar company, not the domain owner’s, if they make a WHOIS lookup. The Whois Privacy Protection service is supported by all generic domain extensions, but it is still not possible to hide your personal details with some country-code extensions.