Most of this series is about information other people published about you. This chapter is different: it's about the information you filed — on the day you started a company, registered to vote, or bought a home. Nobody scraped it. You signed it.
For founders and directors it is very often the exposure they least expect — because nobody mentions it at incorporation.
If you are a UK company director, Companies House publishes, for anyone to read, free, no account needed:
One boundary worth knowing exactly. The public register shows your month and year of birth. Documents filed before October 2015 can still show your full date of birth, because the register wasn't edited retrospectively — so an old filing may reveal what the current register conceals.
None of this required a data broker. It's the register working as designed — the trade-off is that limited liability comes with public accountability. The part almost nobody is told at incorporation is the next one.
The register is public data, so an industry republishes it. Company-data sites copy Companies House wholesale and rebuild it into searchable director profiles — your name, your age bracket, your address history, your co-directors — optimised to rank for a search of your name. Removing your address from Companies House does not remove it from the copies, and each copy has its own removal process.
1. Stop the bleeding first: change your registered addresses. Appoint a registered office and a service address that are not your home — an accountant's office or a registered-agent service. This fixes the future; it does not fix the past.
2. Ask Companies House to suppress your home address. Where your residential address appears on the register, you can apply to have it removed from public view using the form on gov.uk (search "remove your home address from the Companies House register" — the form's own page states the current fee and exactly which documents it covers). The rules here have been changing in your favour — check the form's page for what it currently covers.
3. Then work the copies. Each republisher has its own process — our free do-it-yourself guides walk through each one, no account needed. Do the register first, the copies second: a copy refreshed from a register you haven't fixed will just re-add you.
Honesty section — read it before deciding this chapter "worked":
Doing this properly is a form, a fee, an address change, and then one removal request per republisher — plus re-checking each of them on its own cycle, because company-data sites rebuild from fresh register data.
Our free scan checks the register republishers our scanner reads — including copies of the register like the ones above — and shows you what a stranger's search returns. The scan takes under a minute, no account. See what's exposed.
Part of Hard to Find — the free course in what the internet holds about you.