A change to the Commercial Code, which became effective on 1 January 2023, means that an “entrepreneur individual” who requests that their information is not included on the public distribution list under article Article R123-232-1 of the Commercial Code will have all their personal information redacted from their public record.
The French Registry have updated their records so that such individuals who object to their information being made public have such information removed so that the only information remaining relates to the identifier within the directory and the municipality; this information alone is not helpful.
Although OpenCorporates obtained this data prior to the change in Commercial Code, continuing to publish it is a direct violation of the Commercial Code in France.
We are aware that this may be disappointing to our customers but the risk of continuing to publish the data, in clear contravention of the Commercial Code, could lead to sanctions against OpenCorporates which could potentially limit our ability to provide French data more broadly going forward. We have therefore taken the decision to remove “entrepreneur individuals” from our dataset.
What is being deleted?
We will be deleting a little over 12.5m companies. This is all companies with the ‘Entrepreneur individuel’ company_type that we have acquired from the France data source, including ~12.3m in France itself as well as a small number in its various overseas territories.
When will it be deleted?
We are currently in the testing phase of the project, but we expect that we will be taking action within the next 2 weeks (starting 15 August ‘23).
Can I keep the data?
We would recommend that you seek independent legal advice should you wish to retain the data. Practically, if you wish to retain this data you should back up your last bulk data delivery or the data you retrieved via the API prior to receiving this notification.
See: France