Hacker News Reader

Comment by ensignavenger | Hacker News Reader

This is such a massive invasion of privacy. The government is completely (and perhaps willingly) incompetent to keep this information confidential.

View on HN

The corporate form is a privilege, not a right. Capital does not have the right to remain anonymous.

People should have the right to go about their business without having it tracked in a government database. It is no different than any other aspect of personal privacy as enshrined in the 4th Amendment. Deputizing corporations, banks, and other private entities to collect this data on behalf of the government does not make it any less a violation of 4th Amendment rights.

No one’s stopping you from doing business. They are stopping you from using an anonymous LLC to hide assets. That’s not personal privacy.

Shortly after this passed it turned out that propublica ended up in the possession of what appears to be the detailed tax records of every American. And this happened even though there are substantial criminal consequences attached to the disclosure of misuse of tax records.

In the case of this Beneficial Ownership information there are no such assurances, even though the much stronger ones for tax records turned out to be woefully inadequate.

> The government is completely (and perhaps willingly) incompetent to keep this information confidential.

Yes

It should be public

There are very valid reasons to use an LLC to keep your identity private. Many business owners use anonymous LLCs to avoid harassment, or from members of their community learning what they do, or how well off they might be. There's nothing wrong with that, and doing away with it would harm a lot of innocent people.

I'd say name and a surrogate ID key so you can see which individuals own multiple related businesses that create a conflict of interest and who youd want to avoid working with.

Not driver's license and address. That should be private.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com