According to the policy approved by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the contact info a domain is registered with must be valid and up to date at all times. In addition, this info is freely available on WHOIS websites and while this may be OK for firms, it may not be very acceptable for individuals, since anyone can view their names and their personal email and street addresses, especially in times when identity theft isn’t that unusual. This is the reason why registrars have come up with a service that hides the details of their clients without changing them. The service is called Whois Privacy Protection. In case it is enabled, people will view 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 Top-Level Domain extensions, but it is still not possible to hide your private info with certain country-code ones.