Legal

Public Records Privacy Notice

Controller: Clarengate · Contact: privacy@clarengate.com

Plain-English summary

Clarengate organises public company-registry information so it is easier to understand who runs and owns companies. Some of that information is personal data about real people — company directors and people who control companies. This notice explains what we hold, why we are allowed to, what we will and will not do with it, and how you can object. We do not create the underlying records; we make the public record clearer.

Where the data comes from

We build on public registers of companies. Today our source is the UK Companies House register, which is published for re-use; we expect to add further national company registers over time. The registers themselves decide what is made public — we mirror their choices and never widen them.

What personal data we process

Identity & role: name, the company and role held (director, secretary, person with significant control), appointment and cessation dates, and nature/percentage of control.
Limited identifiers, exactly as the register publishes them: month and year of birth (a partial date of birth — never the full date), nationality, occupation, and service-address postcode/locality.
Derived data we create: a resolved “person” record linking the same individual across the companies they appear in, and a relationship graph connecting people and companies.

We deliberately do not publish full dates of birth or residential addresses, and we do not collect contact details for these individuals.

What we do with it

We resolve records that appear to describe the same person and present a combined view of the companies they are connected to. Linking and presenting an individual’s activity this way is “profiling” under UK GDPR, which is why we hold a documented lawful basis and impact assessment for it. Our purposes are corporate transparency, fraud / financial-crime and due-diligence checks, and improving data accuracy.

Our lawful basis

We rely on Article 6(1)(f) UK GDPR — legitimate interests. We have carried out and recorded a Legitimate Interests Assessment weighing our interest (and the public interest in transparency and fraud prevention) against the rights of the individuals concerned, with the safeguards below built in. We do not rely on consent, and a register’s open-data licence does not by itself permit processing of personal data — our legitimate-interests basis does. We do not process special-category (Article 9) or criminal-offence (Article 10) data, and our systems are explicitly instructed not to infer it.

Safeguards — how we limit the impact on you

Not search-engine indexed by default. Pages about identifiable people are excluded from search engines; only company (legal-entity) pages are indexable.
Data minimisation. Partial date of birth only; no residential address; no contact details.
We mirror the register. If the source register suppresses or protects an individual’s details, we suppress them too.
No adverse labelling by inference. Our AI features and data tools are prohibited from asserting that anyone is a criminal, fraudster, “phoenix” operator, sanctioned, a politically exposed person, dishonest, or that they have any protected characteristic. We present neutral, dated facts and leave judgements to you.
Provenance. Facts are tied to the underlying public filing and date so they can be verified.

Your rights

You have the right to be informed, to access the personal data we hold about you, to ask us to correct inaccurate data, to object to our processing, and — where applicable — to ask for erasure or restriction. Because we rely on legitimate interests, you can object at any time and we will stop unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests; we consider each request on its facts. We cannot change the underlying public register itself — corrections to the source must be made with the register (e.g. Companies House).

To object or make a request, use the objection form or email privacy@clarengate.com. You also have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).

This notice is being finalised ahead of public launch and may be updated. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.