Worldometers – interesting site but who are they?

I looked at Worldometers the other day. It’s a really interesting site and one that I think could be fascinating for students to look at. It gives world statistics updated in real time.  You can find out how many births and deaths there are in a day,  the population growth of the world and heaps of environmental facts that would be very useful in a variety of classroom applications. I wondered if I could rely on the authenticity of this information and who was the organisation behind the website so checked out their about page and their contact page. I couldn’t find anything that could tell me who was behind the website. I decided to use Whois Domain registration   to find out who they were. This is a great site from a company called Network Solutions that enables you to search the domain name eg: worldometers.org, to find out who registered the domain name. In this case, looking through the results led me to Moniker privacy services. When I looked up this name on Google I discovered this about Moniker privacy services  ;

How Does Domain Whois Privacy Work?

Moniker offers domain whois privacy to protect your personal information. Our domain privacy services acts as an iron curtain between you and the outside world. Instead of your information being available in the public whois lookup, these prying eyes will be directed to Moniker Privacy Services to protect your identity and your privacy.

While I can understand why some organisation may want to keep their domain registration private, it beats me as to why Worldometers would want to be so worried about people knowing who they are. If anyone knows why fill me in – I’d be very interested. This is a great exercise to take your students through for their information literacy skills – it shows them how to examine a website to check for its authenticity and whether or not you can trust the information they provide. In my mind the jury is still out on Worldometers.