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Comment by wlindley | Hacker News Reader

As someone who grew up when they printed your address when your photo and name appeared in the paper, and when everyone had their name, telephone, and address in the telephone book -- this seems bizarre. Are you never planning to appear at a trade show and promote your product? Hiding who you are seems cowardly, or maybe you have nefarious motives with your program. Transparency and honesty are the best policies in business and personally.

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> Hiding who you are seems cowardly, or maybe you have nefarious motives with your program. Transparency and honesty are the best policies in business and personally.

I don't understand your absolutist viewpoint here. Can you really not imagine a non-nefarious situation in which someone might not want to associate themself publicly with their work?

Yeah, that comment they don't like? Crazy people will false report some incident to get a SWAT team at your address. Other crazy people will call your employment and start a campaign of attacks to get you fired. Plenty of examples of this out there. Some people, eg youtubers, get swatted multiple times. Police turn up multiple times. These aren't isolated cases.

Here is a non-nefarious situation:

Let's say your side project is for a political party. Then, two years later, you apply for a job and the hiring manager is from a different political party, and has strong views on the matter. You don't get the interview.

  - One might be working on multiple, own, competing products.
  - One might want to have a normal fulltime job where managers and HR aren't worried about their little side project.
  - One might not want people who google them to see they have a project going.
  - ...

Privacy doesn't exclude transparency and honesty.

Those newspapers and telephone books were not indexed and trivially searchable by anyone with a computer in any part of the world. It's like asking why people don't want ubiquitous facial recognition technology, when people have openly displayed their faces for other people to memorize for millenia.

Wow. Just wow. Since when someone choosing to be anonymous equals “cowardly” or “nefarious”?

>"Are you never planning to appear at a trade show and promote your product? Hiding who you are seems cowardly, or maybe you have nefarious motives with your program."

Just fucking wow. There are whole bunch of totally valid reasons why one would want to be anonymous. It is ok to refuse to deal with such person / entity but to blame them in such terms is highly insulting and totally incompetent.

My daughter has a web presence in the music domain. There are a couple photos of her playing the piano or doing something else in a professional capacity as an artist, but her personal details are carefully kept private. If you could just see a sampling of the absolute crap that is sent to her business contact points, you would not wonder why people want to maintain privacy.

</rant_on> Just as an aside, if you see a person on the internet, it is incredibly rude and infantile to comment on their physical appearance, unless those comments are specifically solicited. Comment on their profession, hobby, art, or whatever else the business or site is about, but nobody gives a crap about your opinion on their looks, their clothes, their eyes, etc... Grow up and keep your teenage fantasies to yourself. </rant_off>

That might have been ok in your small town or small city of people who didn't read the paper. An internet phone book might exist in some fashion, but I'd rather not have stalkers able to find their victims so easily for example. I agree transparency and 'honesty' are good policies in business in general, but having a name, number, and address exposed to the public seems like a bit much, no?

Are you never planning to appear at a trade show and promote your product?

"bro privilege"

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