Irresponsible business with no regard for data protection regulations
The business appears to be scraping data from council planning portals and republishing it for profit, but it seems to indiscriminately republish data without redaction of personal details, nor omisssion of copyrighted materials. They republish the data to the open web and sell it to third parties for cold canvassing marketing.
They are completely non-compliant with current data protection regulations and have ignored my emails instructing them to remove copyrighted and personally identifiable materials.
When searching the ICO website it is clear that they have not registered as a Data Processor or Controller and have not appointed a DPO at their business, as they are required.
I have instructed a solicitor to take over managing the process of getting a court order to get them to remove the offending copyright and data protection breach and shall have to go through the incovenience of applying for a court order for damages.
I will be reporting them to both Trading Standards and The Information Commissioners Office too.
Reply from Planning Alerts
All planning applications and associated documents are, by law, public records. Local Planning Authorities are required under the Town and Country Planning Act and related regulations to publish planning applications, supporting documents, plans, and decision notices for public inspection. The purpose of this process is transparency, accountability, and public participation. Members of the public, businesses, and third parties are explicitly permitted and expected to view, access, and reuse this information.
We do not “scrape private data”. We aggregate publicly available planning documents that councils themselves publish without restriction. Any personal information contained within those documents is placed there by the applicant or agent and published by the council as part of the statutory planning process. Responsibility for redaction rests with the Local Planning Authority at the point of publication, not downstream viewers or indexers of lawful public records.
We do not sell personal data, nor do we provide data for “cold canvassing marketing”. Our service provides access, search, and monitoring tools for planning information that is already in the public domain, in line with legitimate interests recognised under UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f).
With respect to data protection compliance:
Processing of statutory public records for transparency and public information purposes is lawful under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.
Registration with the ICO is not mandatory for all organisations, and the absence of a public ICO register entry does not indicate non-compliance.
A Data Protection Officer is only required in specific circumstances defined by law, which do not apply to many small or medium-sized organisations processing public records.
We take all genuine legal notices seriously. To date, we have received no valid court order, ICO determination, or substantiated legal notice requiring removal of any content. Unsupported demands or threats do not override statutory publication requirements or lawful processing of public information.
If any individual believes a specific document has been published unlawfully by a Local Planning Authority, the correct route is to raise that issue with the council that published it. We are always willing to review specific, properly grounded concerns, but we will not remove lawful public records based on inaccurate assertions.
This review reflects a misunderstanding of the planning system and data protection law rather than any wrongdoing by our business.
