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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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...

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.

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