I feel that basic WHOIS is data is important, but I also firmly believe that personal address and phone number information has no business in a wide-open database freely accessible by 3rd-world scammers.
These guys are not out there looking to send you SPAM, they are calling Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, etc. and by using your address and phone number + easy social engineering tricks, are stealing your email and cell phone numbers, and thereby potentially gaining access to your domain name accounts.
This has happened a lot lately, and the number of stolen domains just continues to grow to the point where I won't even buy a domain that doesn't offer Whois privacy.
I've said this before, but personal online crime is not perpetrated by TV/movie cliches like a guy in a hoodie typing away in a dark room on a VPN, it's a 12-year old kid sitting in a huge call center in Morocco, phoning Verizon while looking at your WHOIS printout, and saying "I am sorry, I lost my password... yes... here is my address and phone number".