According to the policies adopted by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the contact info a domain name is registered with must be valid and up to date all the time. Additionally, this info is openly visible on WHOIS web sites and while this may not be a problem for organizations, it may not be very acceptable for individuals, because everybody can see their names and their personal home and email addresses, particularly in times when identity theft is not that uncommon. That’s the reason why registrars have launched a service that conceals the details of their clients without changing them. The service is referred to as Whois Privacy Protection. In case it’s activated, people will see the details of the registrar company, not those of the domain owner, if they make a WHOIS enquiry. The Whois Privacy Protection service is supported by all generic Top-Level Domain extensions, but it is still impossible to hide your private info with some country-code ones.