The very fact that THEY have to know who you are compromises your privacy, because YOU can never know who THEY are going to give the info to. This is particularly since (as the Anonymizer situation reveals), such "let us secure your privacy, just tell us who you are" companies are all too often opened either by crooks, foreign agents, or our own security apparatchiks in order to keep tabs on people who aren't being good little compliant, complacent proletarians who don't complain about Nanny Government watching their every move.

People who value privacy and liberty make spooks and cops suspicious, and they like to keep track of such people. How do you think Randy Weaver ended up with his wife and son dead?

The key to maintaining privacy is to drop off the radar and STAY THERE, or possibly create a plausible "persona" that acts like a good little proletarian, though that is MUCH harder to do.

And you can't drop under the radar if some on-line business knows who you are and where you live, because if they know, the three-letter agencies they likely work for certainly know. That's why such businesses are bad business models. People are smarter than that.

Early press coverage has been uniformly positive. CNN.com's review says "Total digital privacy may be on the horizon." The San Francisco Chronicle's article is titled "Online disguises from prying eyes." To BusinessWeek, it's a "A big boost for Net privacy."

"Think about how much business is predicated on the flow of personal information!" one of the founders predicts. "If you need to add privacy as a foundation under all of that, what is that industry worth? It's huge. Billions and billions and billions."

The year was 2000, and the company was named Zero Knowledge Systems

Which sounds exactly like what ZKS tried, and failed, to convince the public was a good idea. And it's not just one company: a 2001 article in The Atlantic rattles off a list of companies that were hoping to attract privacy-sensitive Internet users. The list includes IDcide (dead), PrivacyX (defunct), American Express' Private Payments (ditto), and Disappearing.com (you guessed it).

The Atlantic article mentions ZipLip, founded to protect e-mail privacy; now, under the name ZL Technologies, it offers innovative ways to "find relevant information hidden in massive volumes of data" for legal discovery processes. Anonymizer.com was founded by cypherpunk Lance Cottrell to provide privacy-protective Web surfing to the public for a reasonable fee. It's now part of Abraxas Corporation, a northern Virginia firm that shares its name with a comic book villain and has close ties to the CIA and FBI. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which once enthusiastically recommended Anonymizer.com, says it no longer does because of Abraxas' links to the U.S. national security apparatus.

Submitted Link #1: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10443575-38.html...

People might want to make sure when titling their car that it's clear that it's for private use (if it is) and not business use.

Right, but local taxing authorities are under no such restraint. Cities and counties can presume that any entity organized as a "company" is "in business" until otherwise demonstrated. Thus the tax bill sent to an LLC with a local address ... if one is trying for maximum privacy, it seems to me to be prudent to inquire about such tax schemes before using the LLC process, so that one can pick a state or locality where this particular problem won't crop up.

... Any state except for Colorado, perhaps. :-)

Harris county's web site can provide more info hcad.org. If it is not used in the production of income it shouldn't be taxed, but you will have to protest the tax.

Submitted Link #1: HTTP://hcad.org...

You have just run squarely into the conundrum of using a business (an LLC) to hold title to anything: Business Use and Ownership taxes.

While this may be a new phenomenon in Texas, it's been the law in Colorado for a long, long time that the state and many local cities and towns require ALL businesses to list ALL business personal property that a business owns (from coffee makers to computers) with the county tax assessor so that they can send you an ownership and use tax bill.

This is THE single most disobeyed law in Colorado. Few small business owners ever bother to file the required list of equipment, and it's routinely been ignored for decades. However, with the current financial crisis faced by most municipalities, they are dusting off these old statutes looking for revenues, and they are starting to crack down on businesses which fail to file the lists and fail to pay the tax.

In a couple of cases, some over-zealous tax assessor, on orders from the City Council, not only started physically going to businesses and inventorying equipment, but they started assessing not only BACK TAXES (I think they can go back 3 to 5 years) and PENALTIES for failing to file the necessary paperwork. This sometimes amounted to tax bills nearing $100,000 for delinquent small businesses, which threatened to put them out of business.

This resulted in some major fireworks around here, and the Legislature has been trying for a couple of years to repeal the business personal property tax at the state level. Which doesn't help at the municipal level.

Whether you can get away with claiming the vehicles are not used for business while they are actually owned by a business is going to depend on your local laws. My instinct would be to immediately move your LLC's principle place of business to a state where they don't impose such business personal property taxes (like possibly Montana) and register your vehicles there. That will require some research though, to make sure Montana isn't going to do the same thing.

Good luck!

... Although you say "they are actually owned by a business," I disagree. They are owned by a legal entity which may or may not be a business. The IRS, for example, completely ignores single-member LLC ownership as long as no tax number has been assigned to it.