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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address

That's an EU thing. If you don't publish in the EU you don't need to dox yourself.

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It's also a very general European mindset thing. They have a very different approach to privacy there - they basically expect everyone's identity to be public, and then protect those identities from abuse, rather than the more US approach of letting you hide your identity so it can't be abused. You see supermarkets with the owner's full name plastered across the storefront underneath the franchise logo. "This store is EDEKA John Smith"

A store is more reasonable to put your name on because generally if you want to meet the person running it you could just walk into it regardless of whether you know their name.

The internet has created a culture of deranged harassment that makes posting your identity online alongside anything you publish more insane than ever. And your market is more or less the entire world rather than your local community.

Europe has basically applied the same principle to websites as to stores, unlike the US where both websites and stores can be fairly anonymous.

Occasionally mobs of hateful psychos will target individuals with harassment. There is absolutely not enough protection from unwanted messages, unwanted phone calls, false reports to SWAT teams, identity theft, who knows what else.

In Europe, a lot of the protection is that they have to provide their own identity to access the system. So I can host something on my internet connection, which is tied to my ID, and people can DoS it, but those people also have to provide ID for their own internet connections and can be traced, unless they are outside Europe in which case I can solve it by blocking all other countries. If someone spam-calls me from Europe, their phone is registered to their ID and caller ID is strictly enforced, so I know who is spamming me. For this reason there are few spam calls. If someone sends me a letter - well, I don't think sender address is mandatory because it couldn't be enforced. If someone wants to look up my details on the business registry, they leave a record showing who is looking them up.

There's something to this but it's still a slightly dodgy generalization.

A random counter-example from France. If you have a one-person small business (i.e. with a registered business number and the right to invoice), all personal information beyond the name is private by default, it cannot be looked up. The Nordic countries are perhaps closer to the image you're painting. Personal tax information is famously public in Sweden, for example.

But IMO differences are easy to exaggerate. Let's not forget that private phone numbers used to be published in paper directories - with home addresses! - everywhere, including America.

> The Nordic countries are perhaps closer to the image you're painting. Personal tax information is famously public in Sweden, for example.

It used to be much more open, with phonebooks and open tax records, but the last decades I think every Scandinavian country have started prioritizing especially online privacy. E. g. the Norwegian Datatilsynet used to be legendarily tough on things like public CCTV, and now they go after even random chrome extensions.

It's infamously difficult to dox someone from Scandinavia compared to e. g. the US with tons of databrokers.

It's also in the US. A consumer protection law in California started it around a decade ago and Google applied it to everyone instead of letting us opt out of the state (it's why I let my Android app die), and since then they've also disallowed PO boxes.

The solution I figured out is to use a forwarding service (e.g., Anytime Mailbox) and then you fill out a form with USPS that basically declares that the business is the using that address as a proxy.

Technically the government knows where you are and all that, but the public doesn't easily know where I literally sleep at night.

And, really, if someone was to mail me a letter as a customer, I would get it. The forwarding service will scan mail for me or let me pick it up in person for a trivial fee

This ends up costing about $10/month depending where you live.

Just one more little way that this is a bit of a hassle to just sell a little $5 app as a side gig.

And I know this is more of a government regulation thing but I wonder if there's no other way to be compliant with regulations and also save solo/small businesses from this little extra bit of annoyance and cost.

Large companies or even relatively small businesses that exist in leased commercial space don't have this problem since their mailing address does not represent a real person's house and has no ties to an individual.

Why isn’t Apple the business with the contact info? They’re taking 15-30% cut and fully control their software APIs.

Unless I’m mistaken, Steam and GOG games aren’t listing the address of the game developers in the EU, but I admit that I might be mistaken.

Apple is just the delivery man, the app contents are solely created by the developer and are not changed by apple

Because of how the EU law was written

Nope, at least in Play Store it's because of how Google chooses to run their store. Google is the middleman between two sides of the transaction and its the developer that actually sells these apps, while Valve is one of the sides of the transaction and sells things based on the license granted by the developer. Not sure how Apple does it though.

Google publishes seller contact and Google and Apple both do so because of how EU law was written as it pertains to how they set up their stores

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