Private Domain Registration Info

I received the following email today regarding one of my registered websites:

As part of the rules of domain ownership, ICANN (the international governing organization of domain domains) requires that your contact information be publicly accessible. Therefore, your name, address, email address and phone number are made available to anyone who performs a whois search for the domain name.

We understand that making this information publicly available is not the best solution for many customers, but it is a requirement for domain ownership. In addition, using false contact information violates domain registration agreements and could lead to loss of domain ownership.  But there is now an alternative:

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Private Whois Service is now available to protect your privacy!
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In order to help protect our customer's privacy we offer a Private Whois service which will remove your private information from the whois database. This service will display proxy information for the name, address, phone number and use an alias email address. Any emails sent to the proxy email will be forwarded to your actual domain contact email address.

The Private Whois service is $5 per year and can be activated by visiting your Control Panel Domain manager at:

I'm a bit confused on how they, or anyone else for that matter, can offer this service, as I thought, and is stated in the first paragraph, that rge info had to be made public.

I don't doubt the legality of this, as it's a pretty reputable hosting company, which also handles domain registration. I'm just curious on why this is legal.