Alternatives To 192.Com

[Theblip]

Apologies if I’m in the wrong category. To find online someone’s address and/or phone number in the UK, are there any (preferably free) alternatives to 192.com?

[barry1010]

It is very difficult to do so these days due to data protection laws and the large percentage of people that tick the box on the election register that stops companies like 192.com printing the data.

If you can't find the number in the phone book https://www.thephonebook.bt.com/person/ then probably the easiest way to do it is to search social media such as Facebook.

[Tuvok]

http://www.britishphonebook.com

This is not the BT Phonebook site.

[Buenchico]

Any phone number that's not ex-directory will be available via Barry's link. (Other sites can't add anything extra to the search capabilities). In years gone by though (when I was playing with my pet dinosaur) it was considered highly unusual for someone to 'go ex-directory'. However nowadays around three quarters of residential numbers are ex-directory. So the majority of numbers simply aren't available via any website.

Everybody who is eligible to vote is required, by law, to be included on the electoral register for their area. Before the days of computers, electoral register could be consulted at local post offices and libraries, as well as at council offices. They were difficult to search though, because the listings were in the order of streets within each ward and not arranged alphabetically by voters' names.

Around a couple of decades ago, electoral registers were made digitally available to anyone who could afford to buy them, such as firms sending out junk mail on behalf of their clients. One such purchaser was a firm called UK Info-Disk, who put all of the nation's electoral registers (in a searchable format) onto CD-ROMs, which could be purchased by anyone with enough money. (They were far from cheap!). Lots of public libraries bought them though, meaning that for a few years it was easy to find the address of almost any adult in the UK, simply by calling into one's local library.

Then data privacy concerns crept in, with many people saying that they didn't want their details made available to (for example) junk mail firms. So in 2002 the electoral register was split into two, with the full register only being available in digital form to the police, HMRC, certain other government agencies and credit reference agencies. The 'open' [='edited'] register (which only includes people who've not taken up the option to have their details removed from it) is now the ONLY one available for purchase. At around the same time, with the blossoming of the internet, UK Info-Disk morphed into 192.com, which is the ONLY firm that forks out millions of pounds to buy up the rights to the open registers, in order to then sell that information on to the general public online.

As many (possibly most) people now tick the box on their electoral registration forms to exclude their names from the open register, the chances of finding someone listed on 192.com aren't particularly good anyway, even if you're prepared to pay their high prices for search credits.

The only way to access the full registers these days is to visit the local council offices of the area that the person you're seeking lives in. You have to make an appointment to view the printed register and sign a declaration that you won't use the information for any unlawful purpose. A council official must then monitor your use of the register, in order to check that you've not written anything down or otherwise made a copy of the information. The registers continue to be listed solely in the order of street names within each ward, making searching for an individual a very difficult task.

So 192.com is the ONLY search site available for you to use and, even if you do pay to use it, there can be no guarantee that you'll find the person you're looking for.

[ibbyk]

not free but check out https://uktrace.co.uk/pages/how-to-find-someones-address