According to the policy adopted 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. At the same time, this information is freely visible on WHOIS web sites and while this may be OK for corporations, it may not be very convenient for individuals, because anyone can see their names and their personal email and home addresses, particularly in an age when identity theft is not that rare. For this reason, registrars have launched a service that conceals the details of their clients without changing them. The service is referred to as Whois Privacy Protection. If it’s active, people will see the details of the registrar, not those of the domain owner, if they perform a WHOIS search. The Whois Privacy Protection service is supported by all generic TLD extensions, but it is still not possible to hide your info with certain country-code extensions.