Privacy

What we publish about people, where it comes from, and how to ask us to stop.

Who we are

"CUK" means Companies In The UK, a trading name of Comdevelopment Limited (registered in England and Wales, company number 03498208, registered office Flat 34 Lulworth Lodge, 5 Palatine Road, Southport, England, PR8 2BS), the operator of this website and the controller of the personal data described below.
Postal address: Companies In The UK, Unit 6301, PO Box 6945, London, W1A 6US.
Contact (preferred): companiesintheuk.co.uk/support/contact

Where the information comes from

Almost none of the personal data on this site was collected from the people it describes. It is republished from public registers and other public sources — chiefly the Companies House register and The Gazette, alongside other public datasets such as the insolvency and disqualification registers.

Because we did not obtain it from you, this page is how we tell you that we hold it, what we do with it, and what you can ask us to do about it.

What we publish about people

  • Names, roles and appointment dates of company officers, and the month and year of birth where the register publishes it.
  • Registered office and service addresses as they appear on the register.
  • "Persons with significant control" entries, as published.
  • Filing history, and copies of filed documents as published by Companies House.
  • Notices published in The Gazette, and insolvency or disqualification entries where they exist.
  • Contact details, such as a telephone number, only where our crawler found them on the company's own public website.

Why we publish it

We rely on legitimate interests: making the public register genuinely searchable so that people can check who they are dealing with before they trade with, lend to, or join a company. That is the same purpose for which the underlying registers are published. We weigh it against the privacy of the individuals named, which is why the removal routes below exist and are used.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not use it for direct marketing, prospecting or lead generation.

Information you give us directly

  • Signing in. If you create an account we hold your email address and the companies you have chosen to follow, so we can send you the alerts you asked for. Sign-in is by emailed link — we store no password.
  • Contacting us. If you use the contact form we keep your message, your email address and the IP address it was sent from, so we can answer you and keep a record of what we did.
  • Subscriptions. If you subscribe, we keep which account holds the subscription, its status and renewal date, and the reference numbers our payment provider gives us. We never see or store your card details. Payment is handled by Stripe, and the purchase is sold through Link (operated by Stripe), which processes your name, email, billing address and payment details as an independent controller under Link's privacy policy, including to calculate and pay VAT, prevent fraud and send your receipts. We keep subscription records for as long as the law requires us to keep business and tax records (currently six years).
  • How subscribers use the service. While you are signed in with a paid subscription we record which pages you view and the searches you make, so we can see which parts of the service are useful and improve them. This is kept for 90 days and then deleted. It is not used for advertising and not shared. We do not record this for visitors who are not subscribers.
  • Subscription waitlist. If you ask to be told when subscriptions open, we keep your email address, which part of the site you came from, and the price shown at the time. We use it only to send you that one email, on your consent; ask us and we will delete it. We do not keep your IP address with it.

Anonymous visitors are not given cookies, and our analytics are cookieless. We do not show advertising.

Who else sees it

Company pages are public, and search engines index them. The names and personal details of officers and persons with significant control, officer profiles, filings containing personal details and Gazette notice texts are shown only to subscribers, and are not indexed. Subscribers can also search Gazette notices and disqualification records by a person's name; that search is not offered to anyone else. Beyond that we share personal data only with the suppliers who run the service for us — hosting, payments (Stripe and Link), email delivery and error monitoring — and where the law requires it.

How long we keep it

Register information is kept for as long as it is published by the source registers, which retain dissolved companies and past appointments for many years. Account data is kept until you close the account. Support correspondence is kept while we may still need it to handle a dispute. Where we suppress information at someone's request we keep a minimal record of the suppression itself — without it, the next import would simply republish what we had just removed.

Your rights, and how to use them

You can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to erase it, to restrict or object to our processing, and to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) if you are not satisfied with our response.

The fastest route is the contact form, which raises a ticket and reaches the people who can act on it. Tell us which page or company you mean — a link is ideal. We will confirm what we have done.

Two things worth knowing before you write:

  • We are not the register. Removing something here does not change the Companies House record, and the information may still be public there and on other sites. If you want it changed or protected at source, that has to be applied for with Companies House, which runs its own protection regime for people at risk.
  • Search engines keep their own copies. Once a page here no longer shows your name, it drops out of search results as the engines re-visit the site, which usually takes a few weeks. We cannot delete their copies directly.

Telephone numbers

Where a page shows a telephone number, our crawler found it on that company's own public website. Those numbers go out of date and are sometimes simply wrong. If a number on this site reaches you and should not, tell us and we will remove it — we do not require you to prove anything. We do not add or change a number on request, because we have no way to verify who a number really belongs to.