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Name a company that is legal to run that SHOULD have it's owner's identity hidden... Only those that dwell in darkness fear the light. Exposing who own these L

• toolz 3y ago
  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.
  • newsclues 3y ago
    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!
    • ericd 3y ago
      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.
    • toolz 3y ago
      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.
      • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
        Launderers are always incorporated. If they weren't, they wouldn't be able to launder.
        • toolz 3y ago
          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...
          • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
            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'.
            • toolz 3y ago
              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.
• sillysaurusx 3y ago
  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.
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    Never before had it crossed my mind that some professional had a load of CAD sex toy blueprints on their workstation.
    • sillysaurusx 3y ago
      They actually sculpted the molds by hand, since this was back when 3D printers were crude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31667798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31667798 3D printers only just barely became viable as prototyping tools for molds in the last few years. Specifically the Form 3.
      • 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
        Well, that was a fun read. Thanks for sharing.
  • eddd-ddde 3y ago
    Well that's a different issue, that's like hiding my identity because some company won't hire people of my colour. You don't fight discrimination by making yourself anonymous.
    • eppp 3y ago
      Not everyone wants to be an avatar for a social ill. Some people just want to live their lives and be left alone.
  • altruios 3y ago
    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.
• drewg123 3y ago
  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.
  • altruios 3y ago
    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.
    • SJC_Hacker 3y ago
      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.
      • cess11 3y ago
        Right, and then you can check out where they live and whether they're nice people. Seems good to me.
      • drewg123 3y ago
        Heck, some states list the address of the owner. 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.
  • matsemann 3y ago
    How could this lead to doxxing?
    • Gormo 3y ago
• 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Anyone touching anything in the vicinity of abortion services. Pornography LLC. Any number of anonymous chat platforms.
• axus 3y ago
  If I ran a small service for an online game , I'd want to keep my identity secret. A small (but loud) number of gamers are toxic.
  • lvass 3y ago
    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.
    • axus 3y ago
      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.
• Eji1700 3y ago
  > 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.
• cbsmith 3y ago
  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.
• Gormo 3y ago
  > 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.
  • MC68328 3y ago
    My credit score is 850. What now? 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.
    • Gormo 3y ago
      > My credit score is 850. What now? 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.