"What exactly are you going to put on the internet about me?"
It is the right question and it deserves an answer given in advance, in full, rather than discovered afterwards by reading a page about yourself. This is that answer for physical businesses. It is written as a set of commitments with a route to enforce them, and every item carries the harm it prevents, stated in the terms it would be felt.
Scope. This page does not say what the law requires of us or of you. Those answers turn on jurisdiction and circumstance, and we are not qualified to give them. What follows is the set of commitments this site holds itself to, written so that the harm is avoided whatever any legal answer turns out to be.
What this is, and who it is for
For any operator with a door, a counter, a studio, a workshop or a stall, who is deciding whether appearing here is safe, and who wants the list before rather than after.
It is also for readers, because what a register refuses to hold tells you something about what its records are worth. And it is for anybody wanting to check we are keeping to this. The items below are checkable from outside.
Who this protects
Mostly the people who never chose to be involved.
An operator makes a decision about their own visibility. The people who live with them did not. The person who works Saturdays did not. A supplier's family did not. A great many of the details that would make our verification faster belong to somebody who has no relationship with this site at all and no way to object to being in it.
There is a second group: operators deciding under conditions that will change. Somebody comfortable being findable today may, two years from now, be leaving a relationship, changing trade, or dealing with an individual who has become a problem. A published detail does not know any of that happened. It sits there.
So the rules below are shaped for the person who cannot advocate for themselves at the moment we are writing the record.
Never: a residential address
Not in any field, not in any form, not partially, and not implied.
This holds where a home is the registered address of the business. It holds where a home is the trading address. It holds where publishing it would make verification easier, faster or more convincing. It holds where the address has already been published elsewhere by somebody, including by the operator. It holds where the operator asks us to publish it.
The harm. A home address in a browsable, machine-readable register is not the same exposure as the same address sitting somewhere obscure. We would be adding reach, and reach is what turns a detail into a risk. The people affected include everybody else who lives there, none of whom were consulted. And the exposure outlasts the circumstances that made it feel acceptable — the business gets sold, the relationship ends, the situation changes, and the record does not.
On consent. We are aware this means declining a request an operator has made about their own business. Consent given now covers the person giving it now. It does not cover the household, and it does not cover that person in five years. So the answer is the same in both directions, which at least makes it predictable.
What we do instead. We stop trying to establish a location and verify by trading route instead. The entry then says the business trades by appointment, or online, or at announced markets, or that the location is not published. The full procedure is at how we verify without exposing you. If the confusion is about which of your addresses is which, which address is which covers the terminology.
Never: a personal phone number or personal email
Where a business route exists, we publish the business route. Where one does not, we publish nothing rather than reaching for a personal one.
The harm. A personal mobile in a public register cannot be retired the way a business line can. It goes to a device that is with somebody at two in the morning, it is often shared with family, and it is frequently the same number used for everything else in a person's life. A personal email address is usually tied to an identity that reaches well beyond the business.
There is a practical harm operators underestimate too: once a number is in a public dataset it gets copied, and every copy is a place you would have to ask separately to have it removed.
What belongs on your own contact page is a related question with a different answer, and what never goes on a contact page deals with it directly.
Never: the names of staff or family
Not employees, not the person who covers weekends, not a partner who does the books, not children, not anybody mentioned in passing on the operator's own pages.
The harm. These people did not make a decision about being findable. Somebody's name attached to a place they can be found at, published by a third party they have never dealt with, is an exposure they never agreed to and cannot easily reverse. Staff also leave, and the record does not.
The only name that appears on a record is our own reviewer's, because accountability should run towards us rather than towards the people we write about. If an operator gives us an attributed quote, that is their choice, it carries a capture date, and it comes off on request, whatever the context and whenever it was captured.
Never: hours, prices or stock we have not verified on a date
If we did not confirm it, the field is null and the entry says so. We do not average two sources, we do not prefer the newer-looking one, and we do not carry a value over from a previous check without checking it again.
The harm. An unverified detail published as though it were verified is worse than no detail, because a reader acts on it. Wrong hours send somebody to a locked door. A wrong price starts a conversation badly. A wrong stock claim makes an operator look as though they misrepresented something they never said.
The harm to us. A register that publishes one plausible-looking detail it did not check has no basis for asking anyone to believe the ones it did. The rule is enforced at build time rather than by good intentions: every dated field traces to a check-log row, and an untraceable value does not publish.
Hours are the fastest-decaying attribute on any physical record, which is a separate problem covered at checked on a date, not checked forever.
Never: a reason for a closure the owner did not publish
If a business is recorded as closed, the record says what we observed and stops. It does not say why. The only exception is a reason the owner published themselves, which we would quote with attribution and a capture date.
The harm. Readers given a hint assemble a story, and the stories assembled about closed businesses tend towards debt, dispute and failure. Most closures are none of those. The person the story is about has to keep working afterwards, in the same trade, among the same people.
No speculation about difficulty, debt, dispute or conduct. No characterisation of the business or the people who ran it. Nothing that reads as an obituary or a warning. Removing an entry is not an accusation and is never worded as one, and where there is any doubt an entry is removed with no note at all rather than one that could be read as a verdict.
The confirmation threshold that has to be met before any of this arises is at how we confirm a shop has closed.
Never: a photograph of premises or people that we generated
Explicitly and without exception: we never generate an image of a real business, its premises, its products or its people.
No synthesised shopfront, no illustrated interior of a place that exists, no generated portrait, no plausible-looking street view. Illustration on this site is abstract and clearly ours, and nothing is ever presented as a photograph that is not one.
The harm. A generated image of somebody's premises is a fabricated claim wearing the clothes of evidence. It can show a shop that looks wrong, a frontage that no longer exists, or a place that never did. Readers treat images as verification, which makes a fabricated one uniquely misleading. And it puts our invention in front of a business that has to live with how it is depicted.
What we hold internally and never render
Holding something and publishing it are different, and the difference is worth stating rather than leaving to be assumed.
Held internally: correspondence with an operator, including anything they told us to help a check; the check-log rows behind each published date; and a minimal note that a removal or a never-list-again request was made, because honouring it requires remembering it.
The position on that material: it is the minimum needed to do the job. It is never rendered on the site. It is not in the machine-readable export. It is not sold, licensed or rented, and the register may not be reconstituted as a marketing or lead-generation list — a prohibition that binds machine consumers as much as us. On a removal request it comes out, and what survives is the bare note described at request removal.
Never held at all: a residential address in any field or partial form; personal mobile numbers and personal email addresses where a business route exists; names of family or staff.
What any of this is obliged to be, as a matter of law, is a separate question, and it is not one this site answers. Whether a sole trader's business contact details are treated as personal data, and what ought to happen to material once it is no longer needed, turn on jurisdiction and circumstance, and an unqualified answer to either would be worse than none at all. So none of the rules above is derived from a legal test. Each is set by the harm to the person in the record, which is why they take the same form wherever the business is and do not move when the legal answer moves. Our privacy policy sets out what we actually do, which is the part that does not depend on the answer.
How to make us take something down, and how fast
The route: request removal, or corrections if you want something changed rather than removed. Either is fine and neither is wrong.
The commitments:
- Removal is free. No charge, under any circumstance, now or later.
- No reason is required. You do not have to explain, justify or evidence anything.
- No account or verification hoop. We need enough to be confident we are speaking to the operator and no more.
- Nobody will try to keep you. No incentive, no downgrade offered instead, no request to reconsider.
- If we published something we should not have, it comes down first. Any discussion about whether we agree happens afterwards. That order is not negotiable and it is the single most important commitment on this page.
- It comes out of the export too, not only off the site.
On timing, this article makes no response-window claim because it supplies no dated queue log from which to calculate a median. Any implementation that states a window must publish its observed median at request removal and record misses in corrections.
What we can commit to now, without a measurement: removal requires no judgement from us, so it is the fastest thing we do. A correction may take longer, because it can require a re-check.
If you think we have crossed one of the lines above, that is also a correction. It goes in the public log with a date and a description, and the page is fixed in place with a visible note. A line that quietly moves the first time it is inconvenient was never a line. The permanent version of this list is at what we refuse to publish, and the rest of the physical-business material is at real places, checked.
In Plain English
Here is everything we will not put on the internet about your business, and how to make us take something down.
- Never a residential address. Not when it is your registered or trading address, not when it is published elsewhere, not when you ask us to.
- Never a personal mobile or personal email. Business routes only, or nothing.
- Never the names of staff or family. They did not choose to be findable.
- Never hours, prices or stock we did not verify on a date. Unverified means null, and the entry says so.
- Never a reason for a closure unless you published one yourself.
- Never a generated image of your premises, your products or you.
- Held internally, never published: correspondence, check-log rows, and a note that a removal happened. Not exported, not sold, out on request.
- Removal is free, unconditional and needs no reason. If we published something we should not have, it comes down before any argument about it.
- No response-time promise. Removal requests are handled as soon as they are seen, but this page states no service-level window it cannot substantiate.
Request a removal → /delist/