I need to research an aircraft's history before purchase. This link is a good start for worldwide registries: https://houser747.wordpress.com/links/
However, the official German registers are elusive.
Could anyone give us the links to the German registers? There's an unoffical registration site here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/coptercrazy/
Many thanks.
The German aircraft register is no longer public due to data privacy regulations. However, you can inquire with the CAA (LBA) stating your reason for the inquiry. It has to be a valid reason (e.g. considering purchase). They will answer in writing and charge a fee.
Many thanks. I'm curious why the UK's CAA reg. database is so free with information. Surely, under EU law, we have to be compatible with Germany (et al) regarding data protection?
See: https://www.caa.co.uk/application.aspx?catid=60&pagetype=65&appid=1
I'm not complaining, but an a/c owner might feel there's 'too much' info on G-INFO (home addresses etc.).
In Sweden you can lookup the income of all citizens. Each country has its own data privacy culture. As a citizen I am all for protecting personal information but of course I find it very handy to see other people's data 
That's really extraordinary from a Brit point of view; in fact, incomprehensible. I can't imagine many Brits revealing their income to their best friends or even, perhaps, close relatives (or have I lived a sheltered life?).
I work for a large German retail/investment bank (though I am based in London mostly), and in my experience, German colleagues are very restrictive with their data, especially anything which can allow people to make judgements on them. Almost every IT change which might expose German personal information (not confidential stuff like their house address, but seemingly trivial things like how long they spend working on a ticket in a ticket logging system), needs approval from a multitude of German local, regional or national workers councils.
I think British like to be private, but our institutions aren't so thorough about it. In fact most stuff people want to be kept secret (like governments), can be requested through a 'Freedom of Information request' which seems a weird concept to me. As someone else said, each country has their own data protection concepts, and just like EASA apparently seem to reducing safety by not allowing the UK IMCr in order to harmonise rules, I think each individual country should be free to set whatever data they want visible, including registration databases. We cant all be exactly the same :-)
I suppose I needn't remind you of avherald, aviation safety network and probably more such?
As for the privacy issue, here's a well-remembered lesson from my late father:
"There are three questions you never ask, not even of your best friend:
-) how much do you earn?
-) for whom do you vote?
-) how's your wife in bed?"
I always stick to that - but when I used to work for a pseudo-state company, people found me queer (on the first question at least) because their wages depended on a number of fixed and publicly known parameters, such as degree of education, composition of family &c. So that if you really wanted to know someone's income, you always could.
-) how much do you earn?
There's a saying in german: "Über Geld redet man nicht - Geld hat man." (Money is not something you talk about - money is something that you have to have!)
Nevertheless, when researching a potential aircraft purchase it does seem quite reasonable to be able to research any accident history via its registration...surely this is not a privacy issue...how is it done with German accidents? If a D reg (or any reg) has an incident in the UK for example it is searchable via the AAIB web site...but if a G reg (or any reg) has an incident in Germany presumably it won't show up on any web search...
