Whois Privacy Protection, occasionally also called WHOIS or Whois Privacy Protection, is a service that conceals the authentic contact details of domain name owners on WHOIS lookup websites. Without this service, the personal name, address and email of any domain name owner will be openly available. Providing fake details during the registration procedure or changing the genuine info afterwards will simply not work, as doing such a thing may result in the domain name registrant losing his/her domain name ownership rights. The policies adopted by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, require that the WHOIS information must be valid and up to date at all times. The Whois Privacy Protection service was launched by domain name registrars as a response to the arising concerns for possible identity theft. If the service is active, the domain registrar’s contact details will show up instead of the domain registrant’s upon a WHOIS check. Most domain names support the Whois Privacy Protection service, even though there are certain country-code ones that don’t.