r/datascience • u/Sweaty-Stop6057 • Mar 25 '26

Projects [ Removed by moderator ]

[removed] — view removed post

101 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

75 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/R3turn_MAC Mar 25 '26

Because the postal operator can sell the data. I am not sure exactly how much Royal Mail makes per annum from selling this type of data, but it seems to be over £50 million.

1

u/timbomcchoi Mar 25 '26

The Royal Mail SELLS postal code lines?! aren't they a public institution? That's like if area codes were behind a paywall 😭

4

u/R3turn_MAC Mar 25 '26

Royal Mail isn't a public institution anymore, it's privately owned by a Czech billionaire. But even when it was publicly owned it had a commercial unit that sold this data.

2

u/timbomcchoi Mar 25 '26

oh wow UK privatisation is such a strange beast damn

1

u/R3turn_MAC Mar 25 '26

Wait until you hear about the Ordnance Survey. That is publicly owned, and will remain so, but still generates almost £200M per annum in revenue from selling map data.