anonym.legal
United Kingdom — UK GDPR & DPA 2018

Criminal Records

Criminal records law in the UK is the body of statute, principally the Police Act 1997 (Part V), the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, and the Data Protection Act 2018 (Part 3), that governs the disclosure, use, and protection of information about convictions, cautions, and barred-list entries. Criminal-record handling sits inside one of the strictest UK data regimes: DBS certificates, Police National Computer extracts, rehabilitation disclosures, and defence case files carry highly sensitive identifiers about applicants, defendants, victims, and witnesses. anonym.legal will offer en-GB workflows that pseudonymise these identifiers in line with UK GDPR, the law-enforcement processing rules in the Data Protection Act 2018, and the spent-conviction protections of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, preserving the substantive record while protecting individuals during onward sharing, employer review, and defence preparation. Task-specific guidance lands in US-010.

By the numbers

  • The Disclosure and Barring Service processed 7.4 million DBS checks in 2023/24, including 4,067,255 enhanced checks with barred-list access — each generating a disclosure document containing sensitive criminal-record personal data.

    DBS Annual Quality Account 2023 to 2024 (GOV.UK)

  • The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 protects individuals with spent convictions from being required to disclose them for most employment and civil purposes, making correct identification of rehabilitation status essential before any criminal-record document is shared.

    Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, legislation.gov.uk

When this doesn't apply

  • Does not determine whether a conviction is spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 or falls within an exception under the Exceptions Order 1975 — that legal assessment must be made by the instructed solicitor or compliance officer.
  • Does not carry out barred-list checks or access the Police National Computer — DBS checks and live system queries remain the function of registered umbrella bodies and the DBS itself under the Police Act 1997 Part V.

Tasks

About this page

We update this page when our platform or the law changes.

Read our founder note for how we work.

Each change shows up in the timestamp at the top.

Related reading

We follow these rules

  • GDPR (EU 2016/679).
  • ISO/IEC 27001:2022.
  • NIS2 (EU 2022/2555).
  • HIPAA safe harbor under 45 CFR § 164.514(b)(2).

Our promise

We do not sell your data.

We do not train models on your text.

We store your files in Germany.

You can delete your account at any time.

You own your work.

Where we run

Our company HQ is in Saarbrücken, Germany. Our servers run in Hetzner's Falkenstein datacenter.

Hetzner holds ISO 27001 certification.

All data stays in the EU.

Backups run every day.

Need help?

Email support@anonym.legal.

We reply within one business day.

How we test

We run a full check suite on every release.

Each surface gets its own sweep script and report.

Human reviewers spot-check the output each week.

We track recall and precision on a labelled set.

Bad runs block the deploy.

What we never do

  • We never sell your information to third parties.
  • We never train models on what you upload.
  • We never keep your work after you delete it.
  • We never share keys with any outside firm.
  • We never run ads inside the product.

Plans in plain words

We sell credits, not seats.

One credit covers one short job.

Long jobs use a few credits each.

You can top up at any time.

Unused credits roll over each month.

Read the plans page for current rates.

Who built this

A small team of engineers and lawyers built this.

We ship from Europe and work in the open.

Our founder note spells out why we started.

Where to start

How the parts fit

A browser add-on cleans text inside Chrome.

A Word plug-in handles drafts in Office.

A small desktop tool works on whole folders.

An agent protocol link feeds large models safely.

All four share one core engine and one rule set.

Words from our team

We started this work after a lunch about cookies.

One friend kept getting odd ads on her phone.

We asked why a court file leaked through a draft.

We sketched the first build on a napkin that week.

By month three we had a tiny demo for a friend.

She used it on her first case the next day.

Common questions we hear

Can the tool read scanned PDFs? Yes, with OCR.

Does it work on long files? Yes, in small chunks.

Can I roll my own rule set? Yes, save it as a preset.

Does it run offline? The desktop build runs offline.

Do you keep my files? No, the cloud build wipes after each run.

Will it learn from my work? No, we never train on inputs.

A short tour of the workflow

Upload a file or paste a snippet of prose.

Pick the entities you want gone from the draft.

Choose a method: replace, mask, hash, encrypt, or redact.

Press run and watch the side panel show each hit.

Skim the result and tweak any rule that misfired.

Save the cleaned file or send it to a teammate.