Phone number and address search

[joeculvin]

Can I search for an address using a telephone number only??? any ideas??

[chazza]

You could try google, on the off chance but you may or may not be lucky

[Buenchico]

When telephone directories first became available on CD-Rom, it was possible to do 'reverse searches'. However, this gave to rise to concerns about people's security. e.g. a young woman might be happy to give her phone number to a man she meets in a bar but, until she gets to know him better, she might not want him to know where she lives.

For these reasons, the law was changed and it's now illegal to provide 'reverse searchable' phone directories, either on CD-Rom or online.

Your only chance of finding an address from a telephone number (other than by Googling it, which might work with business numbers but is unlikely to work for residential numbers) is to see if your local library has still got an older (reverse searchable) copy of 'UK-Infodisk'. This would only help if the number hasn't changed and of course, if it's not ex-directory. (The majority of residential numbers are).

Some library services (e.g. Camden) won't even have the current copy of UK-Infodisk available because they (wrongly) claim that it breaches the Data Protection Act. Other libraries (e.g. Suffolk) are happy to make both current and older versions of the disk available to anyone.

Chris