companies

One of the basic principles of UK company law was for generations that there is a public register of the officers of companies and that that register includes the "Usual Residential Address" of directors and secretaries, with that information being maintained, and publicly accessible, for both current and historical data. That was then and this is now.. and surprisingly it's nothing to do with GDPR.

Closed registers of shareholders and directors of companies, and company registers where the identity of shareholders and/or directors are not collected, have long been recognised as vehicles for financial crime. However, while governments are anxious to trace moneys relating to tax evasion (and, for political reasons, tax avoidance), to say nothing of money laundering and corruption, there are, in some cases, valid reasons for maintaining secrecy. As babies are, en masse, being thrown out with the bathwater, it's worth remembering what those reasons are.