> Why should business owners be anonymous?
Why not? Generally EU countries do not like public lists of PII, why should business owners be treated differently?
What legitimate use do you have for this information?
Why not? Generally EU countries do not like public lists of PII, why should business owners be treated differently?
What legitimate use do you have for this information?
What actual use do you have for this information? Beyond “it’s nice to know”?
Is it not sufficient that you have a service address for the legal entity in case you need to sue it?
A service address isn't sufficient to, for example, easily piece together that one private owner has quietly purchased 70% of some town's resources, especially if they've done so via a collection of shells. And most legal actions against such abuse generally start grassroots; regulators aren't aware there's a problem until people complain.
Hiding information from the public makes it harder to notice abuse.
Flip the script: when an individual has incorporated and is enjoying the legal protections of being a corporate entity, why do they need their name hidden? What value in the society of granting them that privilege when they are enjoying legal protections and privileges not enjoyed by all members of society?
The real question you have to answer is “Why is it necessary for company ownership to be public information?”
> A service address isn't sufficient to, for example, easily piece together that one private owner has quietly purchased 70% of some town's resources, especially if they've done so via a collection of shells
What’s wrong here? Even with a perfect UBO registry that private owner could just get together with a couple of their buddies and divvy up that 70%.
What legal action are you going to take? Owning 70% of a town’s resources is generally not against the law.
It's not. They carry a driver's license and law enforcement can reference their name by license plate.
This is how company ownership information should be treated too.
(This is not about the parent comment—I'm just posting a reply here for clarity because the other post is already several days old.)
Another is that I prefer to (try to) persuade users that it's in their interest not to abuse HN. HN is only interesting because there is a somewhat* higher quality of discussion and content here. When you post aggressively, violate the site guidelines, and so on, you're damaging the ecosystem and contributing to destroying HN as an interesting place. That is not in your interest.
I assume that you wouldn't drop a lit match in a dry forest, or dump engine oil in a mountain lake, or throw trash in a park that you enjoy. Why do the equivalent here?
(* I don't want to overstate that—a lot of posts also suck. But it's all relative, and there aren't many places on the internet to have the sort of discussion that, at its best, goes on here.)
- To check for conflicts of interest
- To prevent corruption
https://www.transparency.org/en/news/how-public-beneficial-o...