Then they're not self-employed. They're employed by their corporation.

They may be "self-employed" in a social sense, but they'd not legally be considered self-employed in any jurisdiction where I know how it works.

E.g. I used a limited company in the UK to employ myself. For the purposes of everything relevant, I'm an employee of that company, as well as a director, and the sole owner, and the relevant records are publicly available because I chose to form a corporation. Socially I might have been "self employed" but legally I'd explicitly chosen not to be because the benefits I got from that outweigh the downsides. If I didn't want to reveal that information, I had the choice to operate as a sole proprietor without forming a company.

This is my point. Why is there a double standard against business owners? As an individual everyone agrees privacy is important. As soon as that same person is a business owner, then they don't have the same rights?

Because corporations exist purely to establish trust.

Depending on where you live, I don't believe there's much stopping a group of people getting together and offering services, they can do so anonymously if they want.

However, when you incorporate you do so specifically to register your "group" with the government so that people dealing with you know you're operating legitimately, following laws etc. It's about trust, trust is inherently not anonymous.

People do not incorporate so others know you're "operating legitimately." Incorporation is required for legally formalizing ownership structures, separating your own assets from company assets, getting your employer identification number (which, in turn, is necessary to hire people), get a business banking account for the operation, clarifying tax/expensing factors, and numerous other business related reasons.

While I'm sure somebody somewhere has incorporated for trust, but that's a very obscure reason. It's certainly not "the specific reason for incorporation." It also doesn't even make any sense. One of the benefits of incorporation is to minimize the recourse available to customers - namely in that your personal assets cannot be touched. Somebody operating an unincorporated business is exposing themselves to unlimited liability if they run afoul of anything.

Most places sole proprietorships (under whatever name) and/or partnerships can still hire people, and get separate bank accounts and the like. This certainly includes the US, as well as the UK and most European countries (I don't know if it applies to all of them).

You most certainly can obtain a EIN in the US without being incorporated, and a fairly large portion of non-incorporated businesses will need one.

> One of the benefits of incorporation is to minimize the recourse available to customers - namely in that your personal assets cannot be touched.

... and that's one of the key reasons why the other side of the coin is additional transparency to counter the increased abuse potential.

Corporations are not about trust - they are about risk.

Most simply the ability to pool and share risk among a group of people and in most cases limit the extent of of personal risk when undertaking some activity.

In the UK a group of people could trade as a partnership - which I believe doesn't exist as a separate legal entity.

The person has the same rights. The business - assuming we're talking about a corporation - does not, as corporate law is explicitly a legal creation that grants a number of rights to entities that have no independent existence in return for various reporting requirements.

If you don't wish to provide that information, the solution is simple: Don't put yourself in the situation of being a member of a corporation in a position that your local jurisdiction require details of.

> but they'd not legally be considered self-employed in any jurisdiction where I know how it works

In the U.S., most self employed persons contract for their entities. They are not employees of the entity. The entity may, for tax purposes, be a disregarded entity. This may be a quibble of a jurisdictional nature.

The point remains, relative to the original issue, in that whether or not information is public generally is related to your choice to be the owner or director of a corporation, not to your employment arrangements. If you choose to insert your own corporation in between, you're electing to accept the trade-offs of increased transparency because of the advantages it brings.

I've contracted for US corporations both with and without a self-owned corporation in between.