Privacy laws and regs in Commonwealth countries have been way more full on through the decades. I spent a number of years doing amateur skiptracings. The US stuff was easy as fuck but to facilitate a speedy conclusion, you'd eventually have to pay for a credit header...which I never did.
Commonwealth countries had added layers and you couldn't pay enough through normal venues to get identifiable info. You could only trace usernames, email addresses, and old message board IP addies, while cross-referencing for content, personality, and unique language key-markers.
To be fair, much of that needed to be done for US marks as well...
It's no longer safe to deep dive on people though... even VPN's with 24 hour delete logs, even on Tor Onion/Deep Web.
The safest and only way is to do anonymized searches on Google (which won't get you much) or any repository that still does Boolean.
It's all scraped up and stored for potential use later...everything we do and say.