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Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

There an interesting debate if home address being public record is a privacy problem. In Canada the government forces business directors/owners to have their address public for transparency. I find that kinda stupid but I do understand the idea behind it and this did shift my threat model when I had to enter it.

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IIUC part of the reason is so that you can sue people. You need to know their address to serve them papers. IIUC this is part of the reason why anyone is allowed to snail-mail you and we don't have spam laws for physical mail like we do for email, phone, ...

It seems pretty antiquated though and can be putting people at risk. Maybe there should be some form of indirection here where the government can be responsible for notifying you in cases like this and you can indicate who you are suing based on based on either the business or some sort of more opaque identifier.

Not to mention that an address is a bad identifier as it is not unique, becomes invalid/more confusing over time among other reasons.

That's what a PO box is for.

Yeah, except Google doesn't allow using a PO box.

Almost all countries do this, because accountability is a necessary tradeoff for the huge benefits of limited liability.

(The UK has basically one exception, for Huntingdon Life Sciences, after their directors were subject to an extremely intense harrasment campaign by animal rights activists)

Yes, but if you want to hold someone accountable you should take them to court where it can be fairly decided, not show up at their home address.

You need their address to have a reliable way to take them to court.

You can ask the government

I can imagine nothing wrong with having the government gatekeep access to the ability to sue corporations.

They.. already do? Who do you think “the judiciary” is?

The referee, not the ticket counter.

Yes, this sounds like the root cause. Maybe we should have a way to take someone to court that doesn't rely on knowing their address (and ideally is more stable over time than an address, and less ambiguous if there are multiple people with the same name at the same address).

Hard to know if you are joking or serious.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_agent

Yep, there are services whose whole job is "accept mail when someone is suing you" so that you can hide your address.

You need to put a correspondence address, but it doesn't need to be a home address — most reasonably-sized companies will allow directors to use the company address, or the address of their law firm, instead. That doesn't work so well for companies that run out of the directors' homes, of course.

You can see the correspondence addresses for the former directors of Huntingdon Life Sciences in their record at Companies House: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

The UK seems to be heading in roughly the opposite direction. If I've understood the plans correctly then more individuals with significant connections to companies will have to formally prove their identities to the regulators as part of company registration but fewer personal details will then be published online. This seems a much better approach to me - rogue traders and the like can be more easily disrupted but company officials aren't having their personal privacy compromised in ways that could potentially endanger them or their families if that one crazy customer decides to do something inappropriate.

Here in Czechia, not only addresses corporate legal representatives or sole proprietors are in a public registry, but also addresses of real property owners are in the public cadastre.

It seems funny to me that government considers these information as privacy-sensitive while also publishes them for majority of population (homeowners).

It is the same in many US states.

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