How OSIC handles information about you that came from The Gazette.
Make a request about your information
OSIC holds a copy of certain notices published in The Gazette, the UK's official public record. Some of those notices name people. The law says that if we hold information about you that we did not get from you, we have to tell you — what we hold, where it came from, why we have it, and what you can do about it. That is what this page does.
If you were named in a wills and probate notice — as an executor, an administrator, a solicitor acting for an estate, or the person who placed the notice — this page is about you.
Data Torturing Solutions Ltd (DTS) operates OSIC and is the data controller for the information described here.
If you would rather write to us on paper, email us and we will give you a postal address.
If a business customer of ours has loaded these notices into their own separate OSIC instance, they are the controller for their copy, not us, and you would need to contact them. We are the controller for the copy described on this page.
All of it comes from The Gazette (https://www.thegazette.co.uk), published by TSO under the superintendence of His Majesty's Stationery Office, part of The National Archives. We did not receive any of it from you.
We collect it by reading The Gazette's own published search feed. We do not have any special access, and we do not hold anything The Gazette has not published.
At the moment we hold one kind of notice: deceased estates notices, also called wills and probate notices or Trustee Act 1925 section 27 notices. These are the notices an executor publishes to invite anyone with a claim against an estate to come forward before the estate is shared out.
From each notice:
where stated, and the date they died
and the address given for them on the notice
and postcode area it relates to
A note about people who have died. Data protection law in the UK applies to living people. It does not apply to information about someone who has died. We mention this because these notices are mostly about people who have died — but the executors, administrators, solicitors and agents named alongside them are living people, and this page is for them.
If you live at the address of someone who has died, that address is in our records even though you are not named. You can ask us to remove it. See "What you can do" below.
We hold these notices so that OSIC can offer accurate, dated, authoritative records about organisations and the people who represent them, to customers doing due diligence and security research.
Our lawful basis is legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) UK GDPR). The interests are our own commercial interest in providing that service, and the wider interest in notices that Parliament requires to be published being findable — which is the reason they are published in the first place.
We have written down that assessment and we will provide it on request.
What we do not do with it. We do not use these notices to market anything to you. We do not sell them as leads to will writers, estate agents, asset search firms or claims companies. We do not combine them with information from elsewhere to build a profile of you, and we do not match records to each other by name. If any of that changes, this page changes first.
Nobody outside DTS at present. The information is held in a database in London and is not published on any website, including ours.
Our infrastructure supplier, DigitalOcean, hosts the systems that store it. They do not use it for anything of their own.
We do not transfer this information outside the UK.
We currently keep notices indefinitely, because their value is as a dated historical record.
We are honest that this is not a satisfactory answer and we are working on a retention rule. If you think we should not still be holding a notice about you from many years ago, that is a reasonable thing to say to us and we will act on it — see the right to object below.
You have the following rights. All of them are free, and we will respond within one month.
Object. You can object to us holding information about you, at any time, on grounds relating to your situation. Because we rely on legitimate interests, we have to stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your interests. In practice, for a notice naming you as an executor or a solicitor, we expect to simply remove it.
Ask for a copy of what we hold about you.
Ask us to correct anything wrong. Note that we hold the notice as The Gazette published it, so if the error is in the published notice itself, it also needs correcting at source — we will tell you if that is the case, and we will still correct our copy.
Ask us to erase it. Where we agree, we will remove it and add a permanent block so that it does not come back the next time we read The Gazette's feed. That block is the important part: without it, a deletion would be undone automatically within days.
Ask us to restrict what we do with it while we look into a dispute.
Complain to the regulator. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/, or on 0303 123 1113. You can complain to them without coming to us first, although we would rather have the chance to put it right.
Removing a notice from OSIC does not remove it from The Gazette. The Gazette publishes it under a legal requirement and we have no control over it. If you want it removed from the public record itself, you need to contact The Gazette at https://www.thegazette.co.uk/contact-us.
We also keep a record of the fact that a removal was requested and honoured. We cannot delete that record, because it is what stops the information coming back. It contains the minimum needed to do that job.
We do not make any automated decisions about you, and we do not profile you.
If we start holding a new kind of notice, or use these notices for a new purpose, we will update this page before we do it. We review it at least once a year.
Last reviewed: 18 August 2026.