20.

Last night, we decided to make a change the way we display ownership results. As of now, property owners with less than 20 titles will have their name redacted in search results. You’ll still be able to see else they own, but their name alone will not be accessible.

This is not because 19 is an “acceptable” number of properties to own. In fact, we believe that owning *any* amount of land is a privileged position in society that should be scrutinized, particularly in a country where land is cut up and sold through colonial violence.

However, most people who own property also own their own home, which means that it is possible for the data we hold to indirectly reveal people’s place of residence. Because of this, we designed our tool with the safeguard of only being able to search via address. It has recently become clear to us that the public datasets we work with were not previously well known, and as the use of our tool is particularly high we were not confident that we could continue to handle every exceptional concern on a case-by-case basis. We encourage anyone with privacy concerns to contact agencies that do publish this information publicly, like councils and the Electoral Commission.

This change shouldn’t effect the main purpose of our tool, which is to allow renters more transparency about their landlord. We can still search to see what our landlords own, and use that information to challenge their power over us.

We hope that we can gradually reduce this threshold as we work on our technology and processes.

We understand that the website is struggling to function at the moment, and we are working on this. Thank you to those who’ve reached out to us with words of support.