Whois Privacy Protection, at times also called Privacy or Whois Privacy Protection, is a service that hides the actual contact information of domain owners on WHOIS web sites. Without such protection, the personal name, postal address and email account of any domain name owner will be openly visible. Providing fake information during the registration process or altering the genuine info at a later time will just not work, as doing such a thing may result in the registrant losing his/her ownership of the domain name. The policies approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), require that the WHOIS details must be valid and accurate all the time. The Whois Privacy Protection service was introduced by registrar companies as an answer to the increasing concerns for potential identity theft. If the protection service is activated, the domain registrar’s contact information will show up instead of the client’s upon a WHOIS lookup. Most domain names support the Whois Privacy Protection service, although there are certain country-code extensions that do not.
