A company owned by an instagram influencer, youtube celebrity, only fans star, etc to sell their merch could easily lead to doxing the influencer. People in those industries take advantage of loopholes to hide LLC ownership specifically to avoid getting SWATted, having creeps hide outside their house and SA them, etc.
Knowing who owns the LLC is ever so slightly different than also knowing their home address. Knowing THAT someone owns company X doesn't mean you know their location as well.
That's all I care about or want: To know 'who', not where 'who' is.
Yeah, once you have someone's name, as well as some other identifying info such as approximate location and age finding out where the live is rather trivial.
One of her friends registered an llc with herself as the owner, and one of her followers looked her llc up and found her real name and address via the state llc registration web site. He then hid in the bushes outside her house and "surprised" her. Leading her to close the llc and move.
Who you do business with is up to you, and you are totally free to avoid firms that won't answer your questions about their ownership structure.
That's got nothing to do with attempts to force business owners to submit sensitive personal information into a central database, which you wouldn't even have access to unless you had corrupt influence over the organization maintaining it.
Classic, "if you've done nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide".
The unscrupulous aspect might not be the company, but the audience. It shouldn't be that hard to imagine that owners of companies might be targeted for harassment, violence, etc., and might even be reluctant to invest in a company at all because of the problems that would come from being publicly listed in association with that company. One might argue that ownership comes with these consequences, but of course the impact might be broader, extending to friends and family members, who wouldn't necessarily have any ownership stake in the business. The Internet being the Internet, this tends to be a particular problem for women and minorities.
Then there's cases where the information could be harmful to the company, not the owner.
There's cases where they're just trying to avoid PR/political problems that can be perfectly defensible, but if you're having to defend them, you've already lost the PR/political battle. The Internet being the Internet, even if they purge all public political positions from their personal discourse, even historical political activity going back well before they ever founded a business could be a problem. I know business owners who make sure their business avoids engaging in anything that would put them on any side of a political or hot button issue, and they extend that to themselves because their name is attached to the business.
Simple example: I know one person who is involved with shelters for battered women. They're fine that everyone knows they're involved in it, but there are some businesses they've invested in where they're a silent partner specifically because their partners don't want the harassment/violence/ill will that can come with that.
> Name a company that is legal to run that SHOULD have it's owner's identity hidden...
Every single one of them. If you don't want to do business with a firm that's evasive about its ownership, that's your prerogative, but forcing anyone engaged in business to have sensitive personal information about them recorded in a centralized database that will be a beacon for corruption and abuse is invasive, anti-social, and dangerous.
> Only those that dwell in darkness fear the light.
You are of course welcome to post your full name, home address, phone number, social security number, annual income itemized by source, credit score, and any other personal information you feel should be exposed to "light" right here in this thread.
It's funny that every bit of that information is demanded by employers, and they usually don't reciprocate. It's only considered "sensitive" information because our society is incompetent and corrupt. The secrecy that protects the rich and powerful is an artifact of that corruption. In a just and competent society, none of that information could be used against us, because we wouldn't be using identifiers as secret keys, and harassers could be identified and punished.
If you have to hide to feel free, you're not actually free.
Name, address, phone, SSN, credit card numbers, tax returns, itemized income statement, health records, SMS logs, phone logs, email account exports, relationship history.
> It's only considered "sensitive" information because our society is incompetent and corrupt.
"Society" is an abstract concept, and the concrete reality that it represents is a large collection of people who are mostly strangers to you, and whose interests and values are by no means guaranteed to align with yours even when they are totally honest.
> The secrecy that protects the rich and powerful is an artifact of that corruption.
The same secrecy protects you and me. And at the end of the day, I don't care one bit about "the rich", and "the powerful" are exactly who I want safeguards against.
> In a just and competent society
...the streets would be paved with gold, champagne would flow from the taps, we'd all live to be a thousand, and our pets would speak to us in perfect English.
> none of that information could be used against us
You are of course free to use HTTP instead of HTTPS for all of your web-based data transmission.
> If you have to hide to feel free, you're not actually free.
I think I'll stick with imperfect freedom in this reality over perfect freedom in a nonexistent one.
I hosted some online game server once and toxic isn't how I'd describe the issue. The people were all nice and gentle, except this one guy, after I banned him for targeted suicide encouragement, he spent months harassing everyone who ever joined the server until I shut it down. Thankfully we didn't know each other's identities.
There was a small game I play, one guy posted a picture of a plane ticket to the developer's country saying "I will come to your house with a gun. This is an actionable death threat". Nothing came of it, banned for one season.
Sex toy product design. I happen to speak from personal experience; a family member was working at a conservative job that wouldn't view his side business favorably.
Just for the sake of completeness: do you think the customers of your family member's business have any informational rights to know to whom they are giving their money to? If not, Does that lack of a right translate to every other company? How do you reconcile 'vote with your dollar' without knowing who you are voting for?
I agree that is a sensitive issue - but only in so far as 'gotta cover their ass' from a conservative job... which is... a weird place for a sex-toy designer to be... (which raises far more questions about the quality of toy-design if it isn't supporting a livelihood). Appeasement to conservatives is rarely a good strategy... appeasement through omission of data about who they are hiring seems like your family member put themselves in this precarious situation on their own volition. Everyone's got to eat, though, so can't be too bothered :)
But hiding who you are: feels morally dubious and self serving in that case you present.
No, I hold the privacy of a public company differently than a private citizen. If you do business - the stipulation for that is you should become 'public', in so much that there is a record of who owns a company... it should be the consumer's right to easily access knowledge whom they do business with: we don't live in a contraband-fueled market, our goods and services are 'above board' and should face public scrutiny.
I agree about the transparency when it comes to a business's activity: its goods and services.
But a business's ownership is about the privacy of its owners/stock holders - which are regular people. Saying their privacy is "morally dubious and self serving" is akin to saying regular people's need for privacy is morally dubious and self serving. Is the old anti-anonymity argument of "if you're all legit, what do you have to hide?!"
There is an argument to be made here though when said owner is another corporate entity - that is not a person so maybe it doesn't deserve any privacy.
> There is an argument to be made here though when said owner is another corporate entity - that is not a person so maybe it doesn't deserve any privacy.
Agree on that point.
One argument I muster for the general case: say you disagree politically with a billionaire and don't wish to give them any money, if you don't know what companies they own: how can you act effectively in market actions with limited information? such an arrangement systemically gives power to the owner class compared to the consumer class on every exchange made between the two. We should strive for something fairer, something more open. And we should not be terrorized by the limited few deranged bad faith/violent actors.
There were two great evil ideologies that ravaged the last century. One promoted hate agains people based on race, another based on wealth. One was called fascism and the other marxism. They both killed millions and they both are rearing their ugly heads back lately.
As an individual you are entitled to hate whomever you want. After all, we all have the racist uncle or the commie nephew. But the law should shield the public from people like you, not help you hunt your victims. Anti-segregation, anti-discrimination and privacy laws are good for that.
You seem to be talking over me and not at me.
And seem to have inserted an assumption of what comes next in this conversation.
I don't want to give my money to a billionaire fascist, or capitalist, evangelical, or -ism (What I want is proper market information to act rationally as a market actor). I don't want to hunt anyone. I worry about what internet content you consume to make you think that's what I think. I would examine that.
You are about ready to fight a battle with a scarecrow you constructed yourself.
A company that specializes in helping people escape from horrible rulers would be an example. Not everything deserves to be public. There are always as many good reasons to hide as there are entities that need to be hidden from.
If a company that specializes in upsetting “rulers” their security shouldn’t be security through obscurity and it would be harder to trust than Former Spec Op Dudes Name Incorporated
Because if you insist on privacy for the “helping people escape rulers” business the money laundering and criminals will suddenly be in that building!
Criminals and launderers have never and will likely never need to incorporate. Sure, it's a tool they might use, but at best you'd take some of their margins away from them. Doesn't seem like a great trade to me, stealing some of the criminals profits in exchange for exposing the people who need privacy.
that's not true, you can launder money many ways without incorporating or even using a company...just one example would be paying cash for used vehicles and reselling them...or buying crypto mining hardware - that's just off the top of my head as someone with zero experience laundering. I have to imagine the pros are better at coming up with ways than I am...
Not disagreeing with your point, but I would think (personal opinion, so feel free to entirely discard) that there are scales of laundering, and the top end of the scale, where governments should be focusing most energy/worry, couldn't be achieved on a 'personal' basis - although potentially on the mutli-personal basis, but I'd also think that would introduce risk if each person is able to be linked.
Happy to be proven wrong though, and to hear counter-anecdotes (I find it incredibly interesting). Systems and loopholes and patches and 'bugs'.
Well, at the highest scales they launder in plain sight with completely de-anonymized banks and the banks get a slap on the wrist. So that might be considered a different category of problem all together.
As always, obscurity is one (often very helpful) layer of a multilayered defensive strategy. The meme that it's useless needs to go away. If you have a safe at home, you should probably hide its existence, because even if power tools couldn't reliably crack a safe (they can), there's always the $5 wrench strategy.
> Only those that dwell in darkness fear the light.
Yeah this has worked out so well historically.
The whole point of privacy laws is to allow for the idea of bad actors on the other side of the equation. I'm all for tightening up loopholes but off hand sayings like this are thrown around all the time and they're terrible logic that isn't at all backed up by evidence.
Only those that dwell in darkness fear the light. Exposing who own these LLC's seems like a solid 'pro-truth' move for America.