For medico business owners and directors of other organisations, recent updates by the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) to purchased company extracts have important implications.
ASIC announced on 2nd February 2026 that it would no longer display the residential addresses of company officeholders on company extracts purchased via its website.
Why did ASIC change company extracts?
In publishing the decision, ASIC stated that it had “implemented this change in response to broader privacy and safety concerns, including the potential to access personal information, heightened concerns around personal safety and to reduce the risk of identity theft and cyber crime.” The regulator further characterised the update as a “sensible precaution that balances the need to reduce easily accessible personal information while maintaining effective and transparent registers.”
ASIC also clarified that the reform did not eliminate residential address information from its registers altogether. Rather, the measure was said to be “designed to create a barrier at the most widely available access point.”
Practical limitations of the updated approach
The practical effect of this revised approach is open to question from several angles.
By way of example, the change does not remove residential address details contained in historical documents already lodged with ASIC. As a result, relatively straightforward (and low-cost) secondary document searches can still reveal residential address information with little difficulty.
Further, the update has no impact on searches conducted prior to the and retained in documentary form (such as saved PDFs), which will continue to contain the relevant address details.
Ongoing disclosure where directors hold shares
More troublingly, searches conducted since the change indicate that where an officeholder is also a shareholder (or member) of the company, ASIC extracts continue to disclose that individual’s full residential address. Given that directors commonly hold shares in at least one company in which they act, this scenario will arise in the vast majority of cases. Accordingly, while a two-page extract may replace the residential address on the first page with the notation “Not available in this ASIC extract,” the complete address often appears unredacted on the second page.
Officeholders also remain under a statutory obligation to notify ASIC of any change to their residential address within 28 days. ASIC has yet to issue guidance as to the circumstances in which those details may be released to third parties, including liquidators, legal practitioners, and other statutory authorities.
It also remains uncertain how third‑party providers of ASIC company extracts will adapt their practices in response to ASIC’s revised position.
Address suppression and broader privacy concerns
In circumstances where the purported “barrier” is, at best, largely theoretical, officeholders with privacy concerns may still be left with little alternative but to seek formal suppression of their address details from ASIC.
Historically, such suppression applications have rarely been approved and the process is lengthy and involved.
Comparable concerns regarding the confidentiality of private residential addresses arise across a range of legal contexts, including court proceedings.
Contact Pilot
Should these changes raise any concerns regarding your privacy or any other matters, and you wish to discuss available options, please contact Kristy Baxter, Angela Stavropoulos, or your Pilot advisor.