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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

One additional important detail: if this gets implemented at all, hopefully it does not affect the common practice of having a self-owned LLC owning your home. This is common for the purposes of keeping your personal name out of public records; it is far too easy to link someone's name and address, and people at risk of doxing can do this to protect themselves.

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Personally I feel people and especially corporations/REITs do not have the right to hide what real estate they own. Sure put it in a trust, but the public has the right to know who controls it.

I have a friend who has someone who has repeatedly threatened to assault her, and her primary protection is keeping her address hidden from him. Should she never be allowed to own a house at risk of being assaulted?

Maybe have a limited exception then, like rape shield laws. You don't need to gut the entire framework for this rare situation. (Plus it would be fun to watch corporate lawyers try to exploit this loophole.)

Or maybe just stop telling people what cases are "legitimate" reasons to protect themselves and what cases aren't.

I know multiple people who have gotten death threats because of technical comments they made online, or just for having the temerity to exist as a member of a minority group. Not the vague "I'm going to kill you" kind, the "here's a picture of your front door on Google Street View, and an unsolicited pizza, I could SWAT you at any arbitrary 3am, have fun being afraid" type.

I don't feel like the solution to this is having victims set up LLCs.

It isn't, but that's the best solution that is currently available to people.

A better solution would be to stop putting people's addresses in public records, and eliminating data brokers that expose name/address correlations.

You're advocating taking away, a method people have to protect themselves, with a simple "oh, I'm not so sure".

How about you make an iron clad promise people will be safe? How about if someone dies because of your minor concerns, you go to jail for life?

Would you be so "oh well" then?

If not, you're probably not taking people's very lives seriously.

I mean I get where they are coming from. It doesn’t strike you as a little odd that people have to protect themselves from dangerous individuals stalking them by setting up businesses? That’s not a little circuitous/indirect? Is that really in line with the purpose of setting up a business in the first place?

It’s not like that’s the only way to hide your identity, it’s just one currently available. Plus it’s a very trivial to look up who owns an LLC at least in my state. Not the best solution IMO

Either way I think you’re being a little uncharitable towards them. I don’t think they’re trivializing it, I think they’re asking a very legitimate question.

Do you find this style of argument to be productive?

I think its pretty easy to separate investment properties from primary residences when it comes to transparency requirements.

This is pure whataboutism and made in bad faith. I feel for your friend (if they exist beyond you trying to make an argument), but there are various physical and legal ways to protect yourself from this situation in the US. This edge case is not a good enough reason help shield foreign oligarchs and large corps holding real estate in secret. There is probably a compromise somewhere between both extremes.

> This is pure whataboutism

This is by definition not whataboutism. Whataboutism is when you distract from a thing with unrelated things (e.g. "but there are more important bad things going on in the world than this!"). It is not whataboutism to bring up legitimate related counterarguments for a policy.

True, I did misuse it to a degree. I was actually a bit unsure.

You'll have to trust me that she's real, but I promise you that this is a real situation that she's actually concerned about.

Where do you stand on encryption? Do you feel like the "I have nothing to hide" argument has any merit? If you think people have the right to privacy, why should real estate be an exception? I personally find the fact that real estate ownership is public in the US to be quite bizarre.

Property is a physical thing in the real world that has been here long before anyone "owned it", and will be here long after all the "owners" are gone.

The public, i.e. the people on this planet, have a right to know who is claiming to own which part of the grass and soil that we all share.

They have the right to know that, but why should they know the transaction price?

To support a fair market of property value

> Where do you stand on encryption?

This is a really complicated and broad topic that I cant take the time to type out here. I do not stand on the side of "I have nothing to hide." I fully understand the risks of that position. People must keep some secrets to protect themselves from society. Especially as everything devolves into increasingly strict "purity" tests.

With that said, I don't think the right to obfuscate real estate transactions is the same as spicy personal beliefs/private conversations/etc. IMO there is nothing more public than real estate. I do not consider real estate transactions as protected speech nor one that can be legally hidden. We live in this world together.

> common practice of having a self-owned LLC owning your home. This is common for the purposes of keeping your personal name out of public records

I have a hard time believing lots of people care to do that - not many take steps for privacy - or have the resources or time to setup an LLC.

People who have been stalked or are uncomfortable having their details published for the world to find need privacy.

Privacy mechanisms aren't just what applies to your or my perspectives, there are millions of other situations. For example, most counties in Texas identify the full legal name(s), phone number(s), and mailing address(es) of every single property owner and their tax payment amount and status. That'd get really weird, real quick for celebrities if there weren't any concealment mechanism.

Privacy isn't a binary or continuous thing, but is possible to varying degrees and requires navigating government and business processes carefully.

I agree, but most people don't.

> or have the resources or time to setup an LLC.

Costs about 200$ at most places and can be done online.

Owning your family home through an LLC, depending on your state, is often a bad idea.

There are generous protections in most states for your personal home that you lose if it's owned by an LLC. This includes things like a homestead exemption in bankruptcy protection.

In Florida, for example, there are better options to keep yourself anonymous. Florida has something called a land trust [1].

[1]: https://www.jimersonfirm.com/blog/2024/04/understanding-the-...

I feel like mortgage lenders should legitimately wonder why they’re lending to an LLC or a trust rather than an individual. I’m not sure there’s a good answer.

Houses are also put into revocable living trust to avoid probate when kicking the bucket.

There has to be some nuance. Companies are known to either rent of sometimes own housing for personnel who travel to other offices. Universities typically own housing as well. So maybe it’s something like it can’t be one of the main businesses of the corp to buy up residential housing as an investment tool.

I agree in principle, but companies (and individual very rich people) are amazingly inventive when it comes to finding loopholes in the "nuance".

I mean, the ideal amount of nuance is to not ban this in the first place"; right now we're talking about damage control for particularly critical subsets of uses.

> Universities typically own housing as well.

I'd expect that argument to carry negative weight with the folks trying to do this, given the hate they have for universities in general, and the love of privatization.

> critical subsets of uses

I don't consider rich people trying to hide their identity to be "critical" at all. Maybe having their address public will be a way to force them to act with consideration of the community instead of just themselves for once while they hide in some anonymous mansion.

> rich people

What part of "people at risk of doxing" made you jump to "rich people" rather than, for instance, "people in groups commonly attacked"?

> force them to act with consideration of the community

By doing what, precisely? "Have you tried not being (commonly attacked group here)?"

Only rich people can afford houses in the US, ergo.

~65% of the US is rich?

Keyword was "afford" not own. The average person can not afford to purchase a home (without having to uproot their entire life).

Some numbers and definitions would go a long way here

So basically you're subtly encouraging violence and intimidation, and want that to be easier than trying to find someone's "anonymous mansion."

Rich people aren't the only ones that want to hide their address. Stalking/DV victims can use this too, or even just a regular person that prefers privacy.

> a self-owned LLC owning your home

Trusts are in the same boat. If you're using the LLC as a pass-through, these restrictions won't apply to you unless an orange cat is charged with drafting.

Is it not public in the US who owns a company?

https://legalclarity.org/how-can-you-find-out-who-owns-a-bus...

Why should you be allowed to create a corporation that has no actual purpose other than a shield for your own private concerns?

Ideally, it should not be possible for random hateful people to easily get name/address records from local governments, but that's unfortunately not the world we live in yet.

They could just buy it from data brokers.

Indeed. I was in Sweden and learned that you can look up someone's address and pay on a government website. I think there are some "are you human" checks, but it's basically all in the clear.

It creeped me out a bit and then I was angry when I realized it's the same way in the US, but maybe worse. In the US this is possible too, you just have to pay private data brokers and a bunch of middle men make a cheap buck. Employers sell your pay data, websites sell your address. Everyone makes a buck at your expense.

If you know the region they live in, many counties in the US now let you search property records by name from a simple web form.

Most Texas counties put all their residents' complete, real-time information out there with zero impediments to scraping and wholesale harvesting. Appraisal value, tax payment and tax status, mailing address, full legal name, and phone number. Basically a scammer, stalker, and data broker goldmine.

I completely agree, but this isn't the fix. Corporations should be expected to behave like corporations. Having said that, I wouldn't argue against keeping it until we had some better privacy laws and practices in this country(/world)

You are right, it is completely absurd. And it's great! Anonymous companies and tax havens (domestic and international) are something completely contrary to how society at large is organized. And it is the best thing which has ever been invented. They are accessible to any person who has about a thousand dollars, no matter your race, sex, age, ethnicity, family name, political affiliation, or any other factors except that tiny sum. If you're not born into wealth or into a politically connected family, making an LLC is the only opportunity you have in life to not be a human battery in the Matrix. And it's easily accessible to anyone. Incredible.

There are lots of benefits to putting your home into a living trust. It just has one side effect of hiding your name on public GIS of tax parcels. One reason to do a trust is so that you can alter who benefits from it without amending a will.

You should be allowed to do whatever you want, by default. Preventing things only make sense if there's good reason to.

Otherwise everything you do, you have to first think about whether you are allowed to, like a slave.

Maybe they can just own one?

So basically you want to give a loophole for Wall Street to cosplay as regular people.

No thanks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532033

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532004

It costs relatively little to create an LLC. This is not an uncommon pattern for people in groups commonly targeted by hate-motivated doxing and similar attacks. This is not a "rich-person trick", and if you can afford a house, the cost of an LLC is a very tiny expense by comparison.

LLC annual registration is up to $800/yr in CA, including foreign LLC's. I don't think $800/yr for privacy is a "very tiny". Not to mention you would need to pay an owner of record, probably a professional, to have their name on the LLC.

EDIT: A quick web search shows that an estimated annual cost of $50-$400 for a registered agent in CA. So the cost is closer to $1k/yr.

Living in California is expensive in general. Average LLC costs in the US are under $100.

> Not to mention you would need to pay an owner of record, probably a professional, to have their name on the LLC.

Whether that is public record depends on the legal requirements in your state. And in any case, costs for registered agent services are typically comparable to the costs of an LLC.

I have an LLC registered in Nevada. I neither live there, nor do business there.

Most states allow for this - I don't know about California, though.

This is an often conjectured example. California allows for that, but it falls under a foreign LLC registration to get it recognized by the state. It turns out that the annual foreign registration fee matches the in-state one. So this ends up costing more if you want it to be enforceable.

> California allows for that, but it falls under a foreign LLC registration to get it recognized by the state.

That's what I mean: California may be different.

In my state, I don't need to register anything for the Nevada LLC.

I’d need to see numbers about how many such people cannot otherwise be found online. If we all pay higher mortgages and rent to subsidize those who use loopholes, it’s only possibly worth it.

hate-motivated doxing? That doesn't sound like a real thing except for maybe famous people, so we're basically back to rich people.

You are factually incorrect, and attempting to invalidate real people's horrifying experiences. "Existing on the internet" != "famous", and "famous" != "rich".

This technique is used by a very solid fraction of people who's job is to do things that are somewhat bad for either a lot of people or very bad for a few people.

So your local cops, everyone on every local commission except the secretary, journalists, payday loan and tow company owners, etc.

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