Comment by kccqzy
3 days ago
Depends on how unique your legal name is. Buying your own home as an individual creates a public record with your address and your name. This gets ingested by lots of people search websites like https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ (which I have used). But if your legal name is really common, it would be harder for anyone else to deduce which one is actually you.
For what it's worth, I just searched that site you linked with my name and the zip code I lived in for the first 18 years of my life, and it seems to have a pretty muddled view of who I am. It has my correct age, full legal name, and current address, as well as two of my past apartments and my address for those 18 years where I lived in the zip code I searched, but it also lists my parents current home that they bought over a decade after I had permanently left that state in a city I've never lived in. The landline number it lists is the number my parents had at the house I grew up in, but they don't even use it now, and it wouldn't have been an effective way of reaching me since I used to live at that house, and the mobile number it lists is one I've never seen in my life. For family members, it lists one of my brothers and parents, but not my other brother or either of my two living maternal grandparents, although it has a strangely long list of names I've never heard of, some of whom have my mother's maiden name but aren't my grandparents or any of my relatives with that name who I'm aware of, as well as a bunch of people whose names I don't recognize with last names I'm not aware of being in my family tree.
I'm not saying that site isn't potentially useful as a starting point to find out some stuff, but it hardly seems worth influencing a major decision like what legal entity to purchase a home with.
(edited to add): It also says there's no public record of me being married, which definitely is not the case. My wife literally co-owns and also lives in the house it lists me as living in (and has the correct purchase date for it), so you'd think that whatever algorithm is used to build the dataset would be smart enough to see if there's any other ways we're legally tied together. It also says it doesn't have any records of business associations I have when last year I registered a single-member LLC for contract work last year. The LLC literally has the same name as me followed by " LLC", because apparently no one else had registered that before in my state, which at least gives some evidence that my name isn't overwhelmingly common.
> it hardly seems worth influencing a major decision like what legal entity to purchase a home with.
Until you have a stalker who will harass you, your parents, siblings, grandparents... and that stuff isn't all that uncommon.
I'm not saying it's not worth trying to buy a house in a way that ensures privacy. I'm saying that there are probably better ways to consider the risks than looking at a site like this when it literally shows more people I've never met or even heard of than people actually related to me.
If someone is concerned about being stalked, they certainly should consider how to protect themselves if they're purchasing a home, but that would be equally true even if sites like this didn't exist. For someone who isn't otherwise already considering using an LLC to purchase a house for other reasons, I don't think a site like this is worth taking into account.