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Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
1690 points by bsilvereagle on Jan 7, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 762 comments
Equifax is selling salary data as part of an "employment verification solution":

https://theworknumber.com/

You can view a copy of your report here:

https://employees.theworknumber.com/

It will contain:

* Previous annual salary

* Previous paycheck amounts

* Previous addresses

* Who has accessed the report in the past 24 months

From their website, this data may be able to be removed via CCPA:

> Employee data is exempt from the CCPA until January 1, 2022.

https://employees.theworknumber.com/california-consumer-priv...




NOTE: It is possible to freeze access to your employment data here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze

That being said, it doesn't stop employers from continuing to hand Equifax your data on a gold platter, and therefore does nothing to protect you from the inevitable data breach that will result in Equifax being required to give everyone affected $0.36 or one year of free credit monitoring.


Wow placing a freeze requires filling out a PDF form, attaching a scan of your ID, and then sending it in over email, mail, or fax. The PDF lacks built in form fields you can type in. The extra friction is probably a feature: https://assets.equifax.com/wfs/theworknumber/assets/twn_Empl... (the exif data on that PDF shows the name of the employee that created it and that they used Word 2010...)

The Equifax CCPA request process on the other hand is very smooth and automated. Though doesn't seem like it's including Work Number information: https://myprivacy.equifax.com/


Shameless plug [1] that hopefully provides value: simplePDF.eu [2] will allow you to fill it in more easily (the fields are already set)

[1] It's a side-project of mine

[2] https://www.simplepdf.eu/editor?open=https://assets.equifax....


Just making sure, the site will NOT save the data that I entered in the PDF? Thank you for sharing your side-project!


You’re welcome!

Indeed, the website will NOT save the data that you entered in the PDF.

In fact neither the data you enter nor the PDF that gets loaded is ever seen by my server: everything happens locally (including the actual PDF generation) [1]

Privacy is one of the key distinctive feature of simplePDF

—

The only thing that is saved is a fingerprint of the document that allows to match the field types and their respective positions (x,y, type of field, width, height…)

If you want to see it in action:

1. Download the Equifax form on your computer

2. Navigate here https://simplePDF.eu/editor

3. Load the PDF from your computer

4. Because the document fingerprint is “known”, the field types and positions are automatically retrieved from the server

[1] You may notice that after a browser refresh the data you entered is still there: that’s because it’s saved locally in the local storage of your web browser

—

Unrelated: some people have reported that the save button is not displayed in some cases: trying refreshing the page – I’ll work on a fix as soon as possible


This isn't working quite right for me (Firefox on Windows). The SSN field is a single text box and the numbers don't line up with the boxes on the form. I can pad with a single space, but additional spaces don't increase the padding.

https://imgur.com/NXrZGaS


Thumbs up for https://www.simplepdf.eu! Just generated the Equifax form.


Neat! How do I save in the filled out PDF??


There should be an EDIT and SAVE button on the right side if you’re on a computer and at the top if you’re on mobile.

If you can’t see either, this is most definitely a bug!

Could you try refreshing the page to see if it helps?


Thanks. The sidebar did not load the first time. But worked the second time. This is on iPad Pro 12.9 inches.


>The extra friction is probably a feature: https://assets.equifax.com/wfs/theworknumber/assets/twn_Empl... (the exif data on that PDF shows the name of the employee that created it and that they used Word 2010...)

I don't get it. how is "PDF shows the name of the employee that created it and that they used Word 2010" relevant to the claim that "extra friction is probably a feature"?


Just speculating here, but I wonder if their point is that they went out of their way to create a PDF that is as unusable as possible, and that Word 2010 is somehow required to create such a PDF.

A few simpler explanations:

- Equifax IT hasn't rolled out modern O365 apps

- The form was created a long time ago, and has not been updated

Regardless of the exif data, I do believe that friction is absolutely a feature in this process, but I also think the Word 2010 angle is tenuous at best.


I've worked on these kinds of systems, but not this one explicitly. There is always a discussion about how to make it(legally) more difficult for users to do something you don't want them to do. It's not paranoia, it's reality.


No angle or point with that comment. Just interesting! I like looking at exif data. And I think there should be more awareness around what it often leaks.


Probably it's buried in a ticket deep in the feature requests lists and has zero potential revenue impact (or negative) so it isn't prioritized.


And then they have all of that as well ready to be breached!


When I submit the myprivacy.equifax.com validation it hangs at "Processing..." indefinitely. #AbolishCreditAgencies


Credit, bank checking (ChexSystems), and personal information aggregators like Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters Clear ought to be abolished or curbed indeed. I hate to bring trans politics into this. I'm sure that's the last thing anybody wants to hear about right now. However we are a class of people whose sexuality can be unfairly identified by these databases.


> I hate to bring trans politics into this. I'm sure that's the last thing anybody wants to hear about right now.

It bothers me sometimes if other people do that, it does not bother me at all if actual trans people want to talk about it. Thank you for sharing, that angle didn't occur to me.


> I hate to bring trans politics into this. I'm sure that's the last thing anybody wants to hear about right now.

I'm glad you did, as I hadn't thought about that since it isn't part of my day-to-day experience.


Hopefully TransUnion is more respectful of your rights.


Is the issue 'just' that they misgender trans people? That alone is already shitty of course. Or is the issue also that it makes later 'verification' by these agencies more difficult if the recorded gender does not match the apparent gender of the person?


The issue is that they have a field for prior names/AKA/aliases, and it's typically immutable. You can watch a person's face change as they read the report.


Whose face to you mean? The person being deadnamed, or the person reading the list of names and realizing the person opposite them is trans?

It seems to me that, for the purposes of understanding your legal history it makes sense to keep track of someone's deadname at such an agency. If someone accrued massive debt (or massive positive credit) under their deadname, then that still reflects on them. It sucks to have it recorded that one is trans, or to hear a deadname, but I don't see how it can be avoided.


Like the polite banker opening a checking account for me, or please see my other reply with anecdotes. It does also hurt for me to see that deadname and my thanks for knowing that term.

It is not one's legal history. It's a monster of a private industry trying to justify its own existence, which the world turned without for the longest time. There are many other ways that these reports have harmed non-trans people with false or outdated information.

If someone accrues massive debt, that's the bank's problem, to recover in collections, the court or with the sheriff, and not by giving someone a virtual scarlet letter. Maybe they shouldn't play this massive game of easy, crippling credit, points and cashback rewards. As to massive positive credit, I couldn't care less whether I have their favor.


> Like the banker opening a checking account for me who commented "OK, we can move past that," or please see my other reply with anecdotes. It also hurts for me to see that deadname and my thanks for knowing that term.

I don't see what the issue is. The fact that you previously used that name is a piece of factual information about you. Should anyone be allowed to suppress factual information about themselves because they're uncomfortable with it? eg. "10 years ago I racked up enormous amounts of debt. I'm shameful of that. Being reminded of that hurts me. I would like that information to be expunged."

>There are many other ways that these reports have harmed non-transgender people with false, misleading or outdated information.

This isn't really a convincing argument. You can make the same argument for the internet, ie. "there are many other ways that the internet has harmed non-transgender people with false, misleading or outdated information, we should ban it". What about the advantages? ie. banks being able to accurately assess risk, and reliable borrowers not having to pay for the credit risk of unreliable borrowers?

>If someone accrues massive debt, that's the bank's problem, to recover in collections, the court or with the sheriff, and not by giving someone a virtual scarlet letter.

If someone accrues massive debt and refuses to pay it, don't you think it's fair for the lender to tell other people of the experience?


> Should anyone be allowed to suppress factual information about themselves because they're uncomfortable with it?

Just because it's factual that I caught gonorrhoea from a prostitute while on holiday in Thailand, doesn't mean Equifax has a right to tell my boss, my landlord, and half a dozen russian hackers about it.


>Just because it's factual that I caught gonorrhoea from a prostitute while on holiday in Thailand

that seems to be an entirely different issue because the information is privileged/confidential. For the purposes of this argument I'll concede that information obtained under confidence shouldn't be able to be disseminated. That said, I can't really imagine "you didn't pay your debts" to be in the same category of secrecy as "caught gonorrhoea from a prostitute". That's even more true for something as public as your name.


Debt is created by the lender to make a profit. Saying that somebody's credit history is inherently public is the same as saying their work performance history is inherently public. Nobody is forcing lenders to make loans, quite the opposite; in fact there is a great deal of statutory law preventing predatory lenders (ie deliberately lending to those who can't repay) and the megabanks addiction to junk like car loans is also evidence of the rapacious appetite for lending.

Thus, credit history is for the lenders and by the lenders, all with the purpose of maximizing revenue for the lenders. How one concludes that permanent credit history is some burden all citizenry has to bear for their lifetime is beyond me.


Should anyone be allowed to suppress factual information about themselves because they're uncomfortable with it? eg. "10 years ago I racked up enormous amounts of debt. I'm shameful of that. Being reminded of that hurts me. I would like that information to be expunged."

Actually yes, given sufficient elapsed time. People change a lot over ten years.


I have a few aliases in there from when someone stole my identity. They refuse to remove them.


If this helps, me and my team use LX and some product from TR and for our purposes sex by itself is not a strong driver for anything. That said, I absolutely agree with your initial statement. There is way too much information available just from those two sources and those should be restricted as much as possible.

As other users noted, I have personally zero issue when it is an individual case ( my personal misgivings start somewhere where it moves to a political wedge issue ).


> However we are a class of people whose sexuality can be unfairly identified by these databases.

What do you mean, that you go through life as a woman but that the DB says you were born as a man (for example) ?


Out of curiosity, what happens if you use a free credit card e.g Barclays? Does living in the EU zone protect you? Do they have access to your bank account information?


I'm not familiar with the Barclay card. MasterCard has a service called True Name that lets you put whatever you want on your card. It's proprietary but I don't know if they keep it between the two of you. European countries have much stronger privacy protections, though they might have social security numbers which contain sex as an even/odd digit, and it's difficult to change. Checking account numbers are listed in these systems. Banks guard client account line items closely, although in the US the government has blanket access without a warrant.


In Norway tax return and salary is a public information available to everyone, handled by the government.


That’s not precise. Gross income after deductions and taxes paid is public information, salary is not.


As a US citizen living in the EU. They don’t give two fucks where you live and will happily tell anyone anything that has your social security number. I’ve thought about trying to complain to them about the GDPR… but anyway, if you have a non-US card, the US credit checks won’t register it because the non-US banks don’t report it, even though they know you’re a US citizen. We have a non-US Mastercard and Amex, and they aren’t on our US credit reports. In fact, we no longer have any US debt but our credit scores are less than 500 for paying it all off. It may literally be impossible to move back and have the same quality of life we did when we moved away. Might just stay here forever.


> However we are a class of people whose sexuality can be unfairly identified by these databases.

Good perspective and thanks for sharing it. I am curious about your choice of words though. You said "sexuality" and not "gender identity". Is there some reason why? I've always thought of the term sexuality to be how you feel about others. Or is that what you meant here?


Gender identity falls under the umbrella of sexuality. I use less-polite terms to remind people that it's the most excruciatingly private details of my life on some bullshit report. One time while applying for an apartment, a boomer broker sarcastically exclaimed, "Well, THAT'S a valid life choice!" to me. Last year I encountered a professional whose mind was blown by this information and asked me if I've had surgery. It's wrong that this is at the mercy of a newish industry that exists to track individuals' merit in make-believe points.


I used to work at Lexis Nexis and I agree since I could see first hand how much personal data and information they have on individuals.

They also used theworknumber funny enough for any "employment verification" etc, pretty sure they have a partnership.


Trans politics are you politics. Share you politics - they’re important and interesting. :)


[flagged]


Please do not post flamebait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


>I hate to bring trans politics into this. I'm sure that's the last thing anybody wants to hear about right now.

You're right. Too bad it didn't stop you from doing it anyway.


You can't attack other users like that here, and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.

Also: it looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We also ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for, because it destroys the curious conversation this site is supposed to be for. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted good things, but we need you to be aware of this rule and stop that pattern. More explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I just restated what the user themselves admitted. I don't believe that qualifies as an attack.

Ideological debates are more likely to get someone to login to respond anyway. And throwaway accounts exist because holding a controversial opinion gets you downvoted automatically. If your intention is to shut down any kind of debate, curious conversation just won't exist here at all.


The intention is not to "shut down any kind of debate". This is about comment quality. Your comment was obviously below the bar—it was rude, personal, and added zero information. Please don't post like that here—we're trying for a different kind of conversation.

Btw, repeating someone else's self-deprecating remark can absolutely be a form of personal attack; especially if you then pile on, as your comment did. That's not nice at all.


The current oligopoly of the big three credit bureaus is a travesty and needs substantial reform.

That being said, abolishing the concept of a consumer credit report entirely is a terrible idea. It is a fact that different people simply present different risks to a lender in their likelihood of default. Having actual data about a person's previous repayment history is extremely predictive of their future default probability (with proper ML applied).

If you remove the ability to use data about that actual person's previous behavior then instead lenders will simply not provide credit or financial services to large proportions of the population whom might be credit worthy as they would be unable to determine if they are creditworthy.

Again, I'm not arguing for the status quo. A lot of reform is needed. But to ignore the reality of how credit underwriting works is foolish. One of the reasons that many developing countries don't have financial services for their populations to access debt is because they don't have sufficient data to do credit underwriting.

And debt is a critical tool to enable investment in the present. Used wisely, debt enables a person to borrow from the future to invest in the present, e.g. buying a car so they can commute to a nearby city and earn a higher salary.


>That being said, abolishing the concept of a consumer credit report entirely is a terrible idea. It is a fact that different people simply present different risks to a lender in their likelihood of default.

And any bank will ascertain this from their forms when applying for a loan well before they do any kind of credit check on you.

Also, YOU should control your credit history. You can give it to a lender if you wish to prove your credit worthiness. They shouldn't be allowed to give it to anyone else. Organizations should not be allowed to track it unsolicited.


The U.S. financial system worked just fine before credit scores became a thing in 1989.


Credit scores were invented in the 1950s. I’d estimate that the US financial system has improved substantially since then, in both absolute and relative terms.

“In 1956, engineer Bill Fair teamed up with mathematician Earl Isaac to create Fair, Isaac and Company, with the goal of creating a standardized, impartial credit scoring system. Within two years, they had begun selling their first credit scoring system.”

You might recognize the names Fair and Isaac as the F and I in FICO.

https://www.opploans.com/oppu/articles/a-brief-history-of-cr...


Yes, but probably by being much more conservative and relying on the branch managers to have a close working relationship, or long standing banking relationship with the people seeking credit.

When that gets more automated - i.e. giving credit to somebody you've never met, then a centralized automated system for verifying trustworthiness is also needed to compensate.

It may even have the net effect of allowing some people to get credit that never could before, so swings and roundabouts I guess.


Nothing is stopping anyone from lending, afaik, on other basises. Basees? Ba...sis.


Biases I'd say


No, it didn't, it worked that WASP attendees of the bank manager's church got good rates and anyone born on the wrong side of town got turned away.


Bank of America was founded in 1904 -- well before credit scores became a thing -- to provide banking services to Italian-Americans, who could not usually obtain service from other banks due to ethnic discrimination.


It's also worth noting that banks couldn't operate across state lines until sometime in the 80s, so it wasn't unusual to see a lot of different smaller banks.


Which is a good example of why you need financial systems to eliminate ethnic and religious biases in lending.


This comment outs you as someone who thinks in Twitter/Reddit memes.


> Used wisely

When does that ever happen? Lending and borrowing are always at the root of every economic crisis. National debt of countries are already astronomically large and will only keep growing.

Just abolish credit as well. If it means the economy will grow slower, so be it.


>If it means the economy will grow slower, so be it.

This is easy for someone to say who already lives a comfortable life.

Credit is simply a more efficient use of wealth. Without credit, money stored is money that is unused, and thus money denied to everyone else. Everyone is poorer as a result because you have millions of people willing to exchange their goods and services but are blocked because they lack a medium of exchange that is being hoarded by the wealthy.


And with credit, money lent out is money that doesn't actually exist until made real by repayment which must come from extracting value from this planet at ever increasing unsustainable rates, and there's always the risk it won't ever be realized at all in case of defaults. Credit creates money out of nowhere, effectively imposing a tax on everyone and making them poorer so that banks can extract profits. The massive amounts of debt people go into effectively enslaves them forever. Nowhere is this clearer than the student loans scam which not only lures unsuspecting victims into signing up for hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt they might not ever be able to pay off but also drives up the price of tuition and lowers academic integrity precisely because it's trillions of easy government money being injected into the economy.

Efficient use of capital? That's exactly what the banks and investment firms said about stuff like highly leveraged derivatives and the CDOs and all the stuff that caused the 2008 crisis. Bad loans was literally the source of it all. We all know who paid the price for all that and who got to keep their fortunes.


Spoken like someone who has already benefited from past growth. “Stop the economy! We have enough money already!”

There are people living in inprovised huts in the third world who would literally give a limb for more growth.


Who said anything about stopping the economy? It will keep going just fine.

I am a third worlder, by the way. My father taught me not to be indebted to anyone, a principle he himself holds to this day and a major reason for whatever prosperity my family managed to achieve.


Do you think we can remove all debt without stopping the economy? That’s simply not how business works.

IOU’s are the oil that grease the economic machine.

Personal debt, when used wisely, can supercharge a life. Buying that first car, a house, going to uni. It can change the trajectory of the person for the better. Debt-fueled investments like startups and property improvements are another example.

Shakespeare was no economist.


How could it not grease the economy? It's literally money conjured up from thin air. Would be weird if it didn't.

It's an illusion. Until loans get repaid they're just inflating the money supply. Can't get a job after college in order to pay $200k in student loans? Lost the job? People literally end up homeless or worse.

That's like saying gambling on futures with 100x leverage can supercharge a life. Yeah, I'll get rich alright if the market moves favorably to my position. Alternatively I'll get liquidated and lose everything.

> Buying that first car, a house, going to uni.

Debt is not necessary for any of that.


Debt is necessary to invest if you don’t have sufficient savings. To say that we can do away with debt is the opinion of someone who both:

- already has a good stash of resources, and

- is incapable of seeing the point of view of a poor person.

Also, all debt is very much not magic money. Most debt represents very real, hard value. Businesses routinely provide goods and services to each other with 90 or even 180 days to pay.

You’re confusing all debt with speculation and irresponsible borrowing.

If some Americans want to borrow $200k to study an arts degree, does that mean all debt is evil?

If somebody somewhere overeats, does this mean humanity should swear off calories?


> Debt is necessary to invest if you don’t have sufficient savings.

If you don't have savings, you accumulate. Much easier to do without a mountain of debt weighing you down. Seriously thought that was the accepted wisdom, especially if you're poor. Apparently not.

> Also, all debt is very much not magic money. Most debt represents very real, hard value. Businesses routinely provide goods and services to each other with 90 or even 180 days to pay.

And what happens when one of those persons or businesses goes bankrupt? All that very real, hard value just disappears. It goes away. Doesn't get paid. Defaults.

> You’re confusing all debt with speculation and irresponsible borrowing.

If you go into debt, you are speculating. That's a fact. You're betting that you're going to be able to pay later. Whoever is extending credit to you is taking a risk. Obviously that's a calculated gamble since any number of things could happen that make it impossible for you to pay. Absolutely no confusion here.


>And with credit, money lent out is money that doesn't actually exist until made real by repayment which must come from extracting value from this planet at ever increasing unsustainable rates.

You couldn't be more wrong here. Credit creates new money. The money doesn't get destroyed again until either the credit gets paid off or the lender defaults.

The Earth's resources don't magically spring into the air when someone takes a loan. If consumption is indeed unsustainable, it's because that's what people want. Industrialization is what's destroying the earth, people who lived in countries with bad economics like the Soviet Union wanted to industrialize just as much as capitalist nations, if not more so. They drained half the Aral Sea just to provide their textile factories with cotton. It just happened that they were so bad at industrializing that they polluted and consumed less. People caring about the environment is only possible in world with enough surplus to worry about it.

>Credit creates money out of nowhere, effectively imposing a tax on everyone and making them poorer so that banks can extract profits

Again, complete nonsense. Alice takes a loan for Bob to build a home. The value of the money created with the loan comes from the new home that Bob built. Banks aren't extracting profits from diluted money, they get paid for providing financial services. Sometimes, they offer financial services for bullshit, but just means that the government should implement better policy.


> You couldn't be more wrong here. Credit creates new money. The money doesn't get destroyed again until either the credit gets paid off or the lender defaults.

That is exactly what I said. This new money doesn't actually exist. It's backed by nothing until someone creates real value and repays the loan.

> The Earth's resources don't magically spring into the air when someone takes a loan.

Of course not. People work to extract as much value as possible. Exponential growth.

> If consumption is indeed unsustainable, it's because that's what people want.

Who doesn't want to grow expontentially? My whole point is it's not sustainable.

> Again, complete nonsense. Alice takes a loan for Bob to build a home. The value of the money created with the loan comes from the new home that Bob built. Banks aren't extracting profits from diluted money, they get paid for providing financial services.

Alice takes out a loan at the bank. Alice pays Bob for services. Bob deposits money at bank. That same money is loaned out again. Eventually it makes its way back to the bank again. And gets loaned out again. And on and on.

In this manner $100 easily turns into $1,000 or $10,000 or $100,000. Fake money that doesn't exist until all of those loans are repaid in full. And in order to repay, things need to happen, businesses need to be started, value needs to be created, money needs to be made, the economy must grow exponentially, and in doing so it creates even more loans which creates even more fake money driving even more growth. If the music ever stops for any reason, it's all over.


>Abolish credit

Expand?

I and probably you are probably working in arrears for our employers. That is, we don't get paid until after the work is done. That is extending our employers a credit line. The same applies for rent, for utilities, for phone data, for taxes...

Credit is at the root of every economic crisis because credit is money.


Hell, taking items from a store's shelves up to their counter is, in a sense, the store extending you credit. Handing over cash so as for the cashier to open a glass case to retrieve an item, vice versa.

There are certain baseline levels of social trust that we tend to take for granted. Easy, too, to overlook that they are easily violated and not universal.


I get paid as soon as my work is done. Sometimes literally and in physical cash. I'm working on transitioning to getting paid for my time before people even enter my office.

Credit is money, but it shouldn't be. We allowed it to become money and it's the reason for so much of the insanity we face today.


Credit was a medium of exchange before cash existed.


So you will be indebted to your customers until their time is up.


I'm going to guess that either you already own your home and your car outright, or that you're renting something somewhere and don't own a car. Or you're wealthy to the point of being able to pay cash or make major purchases without having to save for a while.

In any case, you're already comfortable. You already have what you need. So it's easy to be against the things that would help people slightly less fortunate than you.

Credit is a necessity. For me to save up the money to buy the house I'm in today would literally take me 20 years, because not only would I need to be setting aside $2,000/month, but would also need to still be paying rent at wherever I was. Credit allows me to buy the house NOW and start building equity NOW. Yes, I acknowledge I'll spend a few extra thousand for the privilege, but it's worth it.

Same with a car. If I need a car to get to work, I can't save for 3+ years while paying for Lyft every day if I live too far from work to take a bike or live in a climate where riding a bike is excruciating.

That said, I concede that predatory lending exists. I don't think adjustable rate mortgages should have ever existed. Student loans were a good idea (Provide a way for any qualified person to attend college regardless of current financial status), but ended up with disastrous side effects (Tuition hikes to extract more money, reduced government investment into colleges since students are more able to foot the bill).

I also concede that some people are bad with money. They'll get loans they can't afford and buy everything on credit with no hope of paying it off. They rent things from Rent-A-Center, which is incredibly predatory.

But to argue for the abolishment of credit because some people suck at it is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would absolutely destroy the middle class and kneecap upward mobility of the lower class.


> I'm going to guess that either you already own your home and your car outright

Partially correct.

Yes, I own my car. While I was in school my family bought the cheapest used vehicle there was so that I could go to classes. After I graduated, I continued using that car until I had made more than enough money to buy a new one. I have friends who took on massive amounts of debt in order to have luxurious vehicles right after graduation. I will never do something like that.

Yes, my family owns their homes. Both my parents worked jobs while renting an apartment until they had enough to buy the home I grew up in and in which they live in to this day. It took a lot of effort.

Yes, my education was fully paid for in advance. My parents prepared and planned for it since the day I was born. My father showed me his careful accounting on his ledger, entries dating back decades.

> Or you're wealthy to the point of being able to pay cash or make major purchases without having to save for a while.

Wealthy enough to pay cash? I guess. Without any planning and saving? No.

> Credit allows me to buy the house NOW and start building equity NOW.

What did you really buy? Fail to make your payments and see the true owners of your house take it away from you. None of it is real until the payments are done.

> Student loans were a good idea, but ended up with disastrous side effects

Of course. That about sums up the entire history of credit and debt. A great idea that destroys everything.

> But to argue for the abolishment of credit because some people suck at it is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

> It would absolutely destroy the middle class and kneecap upward mobility of the lower class.

On the contrary. Credit and lending are literally responsible for global economic collapse. It destroys the lives of so many it's not even funny.


> Fail to make your payments and see the true owners of your house take it away from you.

The notion that the collateral for a loan could be repossessed because of non-payment is not convincing.

I still own the house. I can make decisions regarding modifications to it without seeking permission from the bank that loaned the money to me, even if such modifications would lower the value.

> Credit and lending are literally responsible for global economic collapse. It destroys the lives of so many it's not even funny.

No, bad credit and lending are responsible. Sub-prime mortgages, ARMs, and "balloon" mortgages.

In your fantasy world where credit no longer exists, home ownership would drop considerably. Very few people would be able to save the money to buy a home because they would have to pay rent while saving up the money. When I bought my house in 2015, I was paying about $1,000/month for rent. The house I bought is costing me $1,500/month for 30 years ($320K @ 3.85%).

Obviously, that $1,500/month includes interest. A lot of it. So let's assume instead I'm saving money and living in that apartment still. Assume that I'm risk-averse and don't invest my money. At $1,500/month, it would take me 18 years of saving to buy that house

Oh, but home prices are almost always going up. The $338K house (I put $18K down, and most of that was a gift from my in-laws) I'm in is currently worth $550K. It would take 30 years of saving to buy this house at that price.

And the worst part is, the entire time, I'm still paying rent somewhere. And that rent is always going up as well! I would need to have a very considerable amount of disposable income in order to save up to buy a house! In 2015, I could afford a $1,500 mortgage. I could NOT afford to pay $1,000/month in rent AND set aside $1,500/month for a house in the future!

So...you'd significantly reduce how many people could buy a house. You'd think "Well, the lower demand would lower prices!", but that's probably wrong. What would happen is that real estate investors would buy up the houses. The big banks already have the cash on hand. They buy them up, rent them out, and further lock people out of homeownership.

Wealth inequality grows, and the economy suffers. The rich get richer as they extract money via rent, building more wealth to buy more houses to rent out.

Your parents were able to buy a house while home prices relative to wages were better. Good on them. But to eliminate the idea of credit now would be a real "I got mine" move.


> When does that ever happen?

All the time. Debt is almost ubiquitous, and the vast majority of people and businesses use it productively.


To do that they create massive inflation and risk which they try to mitigate by implementing the financial equivalent of global mass surveillance. They'd rather commit any atrocity than accept a loss on their risky investment.


Credit is a tool - one that is needed to keep economic systems working correctly. Depressions don't occur when financial systems pull back - Depressions occur when access to financial capital via credit dries up.

That said, as a tool, it is often mis-used (virtually anything that starts with a credit card is in this category).


#AbolishCreditAgencies

Things were bad, or worse, before they existed. Every little town had one (I remember walking past Palo Alto’s downtown; it was just a storefront with a bunch of file cabinets). Getting credit was slow and complicated and really a pain when you moved.

And before that, even into the mid 20th century, getting credit was all about your network. And remember how much people complain about VCs relying on intros rather than cold calls…well that’s how the entire financial system used to work.

Yes the credit agencies are abusive and lazy and need serious reform and legal management, but they also provide valuable services. I believe it is possible to have the latter and fix the former.


Check if an ad blocker might be interfering? I finished my CCPA request in ~2 minutes and it only required that I do SMS verification. Presumably because the name, phone, address, and email all matched records they had on file for me...


There’s a special caliber of crappy site that only functions when ad-blocking is enabled.

My working theory is that the sites are so bad, they rely on the ads to provide their dependencies as global. Block the ads and you’ve blocked the ancient version jquery the main site needs loaded of function.


At least some adblockers work on keywords. I once made an api call called 'track' that got blocked as a tracker. It was for the pathway you were on after choosing something on that page. I had to rename it to get it to work properly.

It didn't matter that it was an api for that domain. It didn't matter that it had nothing to do with Google ads. It certainly wasn't on any list unless they were adding all newly registered domains to it.


You can just send them an email as defined in the CCPA. Why even give them your cell or SSN.


At least they let you mail or email.

I faxed them 4 times in 6 months to verify my identity because they have me confused with someone else and eventually just gave up.

They said any other alternative was not supported.


You can contact a consumer law attorney to get this fixed. There is an attorney's fees provision in the FCRA which will make it economical to pursue the remedy.


With GDPR you could just send them a formless deletion request.

There are good parts in GDPR for sure.


With GDPR there is no way this could be allowed.

Unfortunately they'd certainly be registered in Ireland and Irish Privacy agency doesn't hand out notable fines ...


GDPR is an EU law and does not have legal legs in the US.


Depends. Do they have EU citizens in their database? GDPR is an EU law that applies to EU citizens around the world, including the US. If you are a non-EU citizen, you can't claim GDPR of course. If you are an EU citizen, you can claim GDPR regardless of the residence of the company AFAIK.

Enforcement of GDPR is a different matter. I am not sure whom I'd complain to, other than my representative in the European parliament. I could probably sue them though, if I found my data there and they refused to comply with my GDPR request.


> that applies to EU citizens around the world, including the US

No. To give a counterexample, there are EU citizens in China, and most internet companies in China don't care a fvck about GDPR, especially Tencent. You bet your conversations on WeChat are logged, sometimes subjected to censorship, and more, it's just how things work. Heck, there are even laws in China that are fully contradictory to GDPR, and the local laws take precedence, regardless of what citizenship you have, if you are physically within the borders you are subject to local laws.

The US isn't any different from China here. The EU doesn't get to enforce its laws in China, and it doesn't get to enforce its laws in the US. They aren't the world police.

That said, I'm not saying GDPR is bad, just that the US needs to have its own version of it in US law. What is bad is letting the EU enforce laws outside their borders. China doesn't, and neither should the US.


GDPR works the opposite of how you think it does. EU residents can claim rights under GDPR regardless of citizenship, and EU citizens in other countries are granted no protections. (I'm not sure about how it works for people whose location is transient, e.g. people on vacations.)

Companies outside of the EU can become subject to GDPR by targeting EU residents. You can always raise a complaint to the data privacy regulator for the EU country where you currently reside, and GDPR has a mechanism to forward that to the relevant authority.


well there's no law that forces them to make it easy.


There’s also no law that requires it be true or accurate. What a great system! :-/


Yeah, capitalism is a nightmare.


Capitalism generally happens successfully in societies with laws.

The difference with socialism is the state both defines the laws and decides how to allocate resources, which tends to result in a lot of poverty.


And in certain capitalist societies, the capital decides the laws and allocation of resources.

At least in theory, in a democratic society, government should be elected by the people. Unfortunately there never was a democratic, socialist country, so it's hard to make statements based on observation with these matters.


Government might be elected but that's a really weak, confusing signal to decide all the spending a market currently decides.

Imagine lumping millions of spending decisions into a binary choice, alongside policy positions and everything else a government represents.


There were many democratic socialist countries, unfortunately socialism devolves into tyranny in less than one election period. For example Czechoslovakia voted for communism freely by its own volition in 1946, and the communists started killing people the same year. It's not an individual's fault - many new unknown people started ruthlessly competing for absolute power as soon as it became available. Similar process happened in the entire Eastern Bloc.


This is more or less what Brazil is doing, but they voted for a (luckily incompetent) proto-dictator to prevent the danger of "communism" (as in "voting for a center-left party" communism).

Democracy only works well with a well informed electorate. This is why we need to fight the diffusion of propaganda disguised as news.


If killing people is your bar for descending into tyranny then capitalism is guilty of the same thing. The whiskey rebellion happened in the US shortly after it’s formation and that was over paying taxes to the capitalist state. You also had the various government slaughters of workers striking whenever they tried to get a better deal from their employers


I'm not advocating for capitalism, I'm just against socialism/communism because it fatally corrupts people's minds - watching local movies from this era is painful, as you can see the horrific distortions it imposed on the people from above. I mean stuff like parents teaching children to never stand out, never excel, never strive for more, never be different - in a panic try to protect them from state-mandated harm.


Government isn't an outside entity. Government is the people--except in a capitalist country where government is owned by corporations.


> Government is the people--except in a capitalist country where government is owned by corporations.

In what country is this true? Was everyone in Soviet Russia the government? Why did they order the killing of themselves if so?


By your logic, corporations are people too


That is indeed what the US Supreme Court agrees with you. Except of course corporations don't go to jail for committing crime.


This is why corporations have directors. Do we have to go through the motions of this tired old cliché?


Neither do governments. But individual people in governments and corporations do.


Depends on your definition of success.If one is Thinking of the long-term viability of the human race then capitalism can only be seen as a disaster if you look at it from a ecological perspective.


Capitalism doesn't happen without state and it is defined by the state, so it's a failure of state regulation, not capitalism itself. States must set different regulation and/or incentives. It's perfectly possible to have 100% ecological capitalism.


Capitalism is the engine behind the pay-to-play nature of the political processes and the supporting propaganda that triggers those failures.

You cant separate capitalism from, for example, the decades of amplified Koch propaganda attacking environmental regulatory prudence and buying up politicians. The Kochs respond to incentives just like everybody else.

>It's perfectly possible to have 100% ecological capitalism.

Only with a shallow and one dimensional view of what capitalism really is and how a state actually functions.


Pay-to-play happens in every single society. The bigger the government, the more benefit there is in engaging in this behaviour.


Corruption of some form usually exists in every society but this form is something a bit special.

r > g means that the power accumulates at a geometric rate without countervailing forces.

What this means is that capitalism requires an exceptionally tight leash to not spin out of control. The mere presence of voting isnt enough.


It's hard to know what you're saying here. What is "spin out of control" and why do you think it isn't addressed by competition and regulation?


I'm saying that when it comes to regulation the sausage is mostly shaped by the same monopolists you naively assume it would protect us from.

And capital has a tendency to kill off competition you assume will just appear and magically take over.


It's not assumed, that's the objective of state: To create a sustainable and consumer-oriented market through regulation and incentives.


This is again, a feelings-based assumption. States do not behave according to this goal.


> This is again, a feelings-based assumption

What feelings are you talking about?


It's not a feelings based assumption, it's the role of liberal democratic states determined by the basic principles of democracy. That the states do not fulfill their role is their own fault.


> Capitalism is the engine behind the pay-to-play nature of the political processes and the supporting propaganda that triggers those failures.

No it's not. Greed is. Corruption happens everywhere, and as ever, a Communist state where government is far more powerful will be more corruptible.


Hijacking here to say, literally all you need to get access to someones employment + salary history is their SSN and birthdate.

edit: and a past employer that used this system

Birthdays are extremely easy to get (public record), and I seem to recall a specific large organization leaking a bunch of SSN's not too long ago.......


Unless you are very young (read: born after 2011) your SSN can be trivially brute forced if an attacker knows where and when you were born, because those details were (before 2011) mapped onto 5 of the 9 digits in an SSN.


You should assume your SSN is public anyway. There have been so many leaks, and it's not like a credit card where you get a new number if it is compromised.


Because it was intended as an identifier, not as a secret. The financial industry couldn't tell the difference between the two so now everyone tries to hide their IDs.


>The financial industry couldn't tell the difference between the two so now everyone tries to hide their IDs.

What's sad and funny is that the login page for "The Work Number" quite literally uses the following for their username field.

<input name="txtUsername" type="password" maxlength="256" id="txtUsername">


It wasn't even intended as an identifier. It's just an account number. "NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION".

https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/social-security-card-pi...


More accurately where you were born and when your SSN was issued (my brothers who are four years older than me got their SSNs at the same time I did). Some of us older folks were born in an era in which you didn't automatically get an SSN along with the birth certificate. And then there are people who weren't born in the US so will have had their SSN not matching birth year.

I also think it's less than 5 of the 9 digits that are reflected in this manner. That would not leave room for a lot of distinction in SSNs.


The first three digits are allocated in blocks to each state.


https://www.ssa.gov/employer/stateweb.htm

I'm guessing this is not a good thing if I am under the [NOT ISSUED] category but am definitely in the issued category?


In Italy you don't even need to brute force them, you can generate them because the algorithm is public.

Except same rare case of same name, same birthday, same place of birth, the generated code is always valid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fiscal_code


Hate to break it to you but that’s 21 year olds now :)

[edit: so I program for a living. you'd think I know how to subtract to integers??? I /assume/ I read 2001? at least I hope I did]


You mean 11? This freaked me out for a sec.


2022 - 2011 = 11, not 21.


It seems crazy to allow a large organization like that to continue operation after such an egregious error, especially if their business is centered around a bunch of personal information.


Their customers are happy. And that means Congress is kept happy. You are not their customer and Congress doesn't care if you are happy.


This is what crony capitalism looks like.


Can you elaborate? Who is crony to whom here? Everyone in the exchange gives the information willingly... people here talk a lot about salary sharing, so here you go, your employer is doing salary sharing with other employers. Someone else facilitates it and makes money. What's wrong with that?

I know why I am going to freeze my data, I don't want employers to know my past salaries - but that's anti-capitalist, I am removing information from the market to give myself an edge in negotiations, and to propagate inequality. Equifax don't have to do it on "capitalist" principles, but they allow me to do that... the only crony thing is the opt-out form I guess ;)


I think it’s hard to look at what capitalism has become today and say much positive about it.

I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually helping the world move in the right direction as far as climate change goes.

It is, however, still contributing to the inequality in the world. I had a lot of experience from the Danish public sector digitalisation before joining my current company, and I have a second job as an external examiner for CS students, so it is fair to say that I’m likely in the top 10% of paid developers in my region. If you invest with us, you can make 10 million Danish kroner into 20 million Danish kroner in 5-10 years, and while you do so by fighting climate change, I make around 1 million Danish kroner in savings over 10 years, as one of the better paid non top-level managers in my country.

As you’ve probably guessed I’m Danish, and we’re probably famous for our take on society in that all our political parties are basically a different colour of social democrats, and we have been like this since what is essentially the dawn of modern Denmark, so equality is a big part of our society, as in, if a private company builds an apartment complex in the most attractive part of our city, they are required by law to make at least 10% of those apartment available for rent to the “common people” at the cities disposal. That’s how much we care about equality, and the best example of capitalism we have is making rich people much richer by basically doing nothing.

Another thing we are famous for is community ownerships. The best example is that we have two major supermarket chains, one is owned by investors the other is owned by the people who shop there. Guess which one has been driving positive change forward, repeatedly been reinvesting in its own business and it’s employees and under covid sent 100% of its profits on things like clothes on to small clothing stores that were closed due to lockdown?

Now I’ve ranted for a while, and it may sound like I’m getting somewhere, but I’m actually not. Because the issue with co-operative ownership is that it makes it very hard to start something new. The big co-operative ownership organisations we have typically came to be by a lot of smaller organisations joining together after they were established. The solar farms we build are a good example of this in play. We’re going to build a couple of thousand of them over the next five years and while non-profits movements have certainly helped made it a profitable area, no one outside of private investors are going to build even close to this amount. So how do you change the world without capitalism?

The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.


I'm a foreigner with a Danish job and I very much like the country. It's refreshingly different. Money is still very important but I think infinitely less so compared to the states; it isn't what motivates people.

It's also interesting to note that Denmark has negative interest rates and anyone with more than 100k DKK is really quite punished for keeping it in the bank. I'm glad that your company provides a vehicle for the upper middle classes to use their wealth well. What's it called? And what's the name of the two supermarkets you mentioned (is one of them Føtex?)


I’m not going to name my employer, but I agree that it’s an excellent vessel for the upper middle class to invest their money.

I wish more entrepreneurs saw the value in semi-professional and maybe even small time investors and green energy investment. Exactly because it gives people more opportunities when they rank up the 100k Danish kroner to reach the negative interest, and green energy is still in a place where everyone can have an impact and see nice returns.


- Could be https://www.obton.com/ he’s working for. - Coop, they have Fakta, Kvikly, Super Brugsen and a couple of others.


I think one should not forget that Denmark's society is mostly homogenous. When you have a vastly dominant, culturally homogenous group, it's relatively easy to trust and support one another.

In a highly diverse country like the US, where the average New Yorker or new immigrant will have a completely different culture and world view from the average Joe in Missouri, and that's just two examples out of many, it's very difficult to build a culture of mutual trust, especially in comparison to the level of support Scandinavian countries offer to their communities.


I hate hearing this argument. Simply because I'm living proof of the opposite: I'm not a native Swede, I immigrated here, I integrated into society by looking at its values, identifying with most of them and sharing those forward. I became a Swede and it has nothing to do with being born Nordic or into a homogeneous culture.

This hand-waving argument on why America is exceptional is really misplaced. America has issues because it has a big population and manages everything in terms of money. Money is the religion of the USA, it's the ideology of the country and when the only metric you use to gauge anything is on how much will be spent and how much return it will give in monetary terms, you end up with a deeply fractured web of perverse incentives and misplaced cooperation to juggle one metric: money.

America was built in a culture of mistrust, it came from inception and it never fought it. Distrust from centralised government, distrust in others (hence having guns, you don't trust you'll be protected from others so you need to take matters into your hands), distrust in commercial relationships, in personal relationships. It makes society feels fake and shallow, like everyone is just playing a part. There is just a lack of communal sense in everything regarding American culture, it's all about individualism and the self.

Sweden may be seen as a communal society but it's really not that simple, I like to say that Sweden is the most communal individualistic country I've been to, people still value self-reliance and individualism, while also keeping in mind a holistic view of society.

I wish Americans could see past this exceptionalism and move towards building something based on trust, it'd be a force to be reckoned with. Right now it's just a huge waste of bickering and pettiness all around, every single issue in America is amplified by this huge egoistic mindset.


You make some fair points about money and mistrust but the parent's argument is not unfair. You mention that you "became a Swede" by adopting Sweden's values. America doesn't have one unified set of values due to being so big. Sweden is smaller than Ohio by population. Ohioans generally share some values, but they are quite different than people in Massachusetts or Mississippi. America is closer to the EU's scale, and the EU has plenty of idealogical differences between member states. Do the Greeks trust that the Germans are looking out for their best interests?


Like dtwest says, you have embraced the local culture.

If someone from let's say, a rural village in central Asia, will immigrate to Sweden and will hold on to their original culture, I doubt the average Swedish guy will be as happy to pay that guy's medical bills, the same way they'd do for someone who does holds a similar culture.


I realize this is just proving your point, but it also demontrates why the US doesn't really see the current culture as an issue:

GDP per capita:

USA: 63,543.58 USD

SWE: 51,925.71 USD

(for reference) UK: 40,284.64 USD

These are all for 2020.


The reason the US does nothing about climate change, privacy, inequality, etc. is lack of homogeneity? I'd like to see some evidence of the connection. Most of those policies are opposed by the same political grouping. The US has accomplished plenty of things in the past.

Homogeneity depends on the definition of the groups. Most people in the US speak English, have a smartphone, etc. The US has long unified behind ideas - democracy, liberty, civil rights, and opportunity for all, a more perfect union, but that same political grouping has significantly abandoned them (i.e., the 'for all' aspect, which is all that matters). When we look at 'ethnic' heterogeneity (often based on little but bias) the US has always been heterogeneous. For example, Italian and Polish, Protestant and Catholic, etc. used to be very separate groups. The definitions of the groups has always been flexible and convenient.

Finally, the parent argument implicitly accounts racism to the conditions, rather than to the people choosing it - a convenient cover for personal behavior. It also fits a popular trend saying that negative outcomes and human evil are inevitable. It's not inevitable at all; we certainly have good and evil in us, and we have the free will to choose which we do - an ancient belief of the Bible, the Enlightenment, etc. Racial division is a choice. There is nothing more inevitable about it than Protestants hating Catholics. Humans have done good things and bad things, and democracy - overwhelmingly the most successful form of government in history - has succeeded by depending on the good in people. You can do it right now.

Why would people look for arguments that success is impossible? We have accomplished incredible things and have much more to do.


I wasn't referring to climate change, etc. when I replied to the nice Danish fellow. I was mostly referring to his note regarding the sense of community and equality in Denmark.

My point is that cultural dissimilarity creates a lot of mistrust and frustration. If I don't have the same common goal as my neighbor, and we have a completely different style--our chances to be in conflict are a lot higher, and so my likeliness of wanting to help him out are much lower.

I'm from Israel, and even if you look just at the Jewish demography, the differences between the different groups, are huge -- even though we all speak Hebrew, part of the Jewish culture/religion in some way, etc. The life goals of a secular Jew in Tel-Aviv, could be almost the complete opposite of a religious Jew in Jerusalem -- you can imagine the conflict to be quite immense, and hence the sense of community greatly eliminated.


> cultural dissimilarity creates a lot of mistrust and frustration

As I said above, 'cultural dissimilarity' is a matter of perspective and changes all the time. And it doesn't create mistrust and frustration; people acting divisively and hatefully, and supporting systems that promote those things - people do it. There's not mechanism to blame. What are you doing? What am I doing?


>The reason the US does nothing about climate change, privacy, inequality, etc. is lack of homogeneity

I don't agree with the general point, but I do think the GOP funding class uses the US's heterogeneity as a wedge to distract from those issues (or anything else that would cost them money). See all of the culture wars.

What's the one big thing congress passed during the Trump years? The tax cut. That's not a mistake.


I used to think this, but I'm not sure the evidence actually supports it. The UK has similar levels of immigration and overseas-born citizens as Scandi countries, but nowhere near their levels of social cohesion/social democracy.

We were more similar < 1980, but I think the rhetoric from right wing corporate and billionaire-owned press, and now the internet, has eroded it to a large degree.


> According to 2021 figures from Statistics Denmark, 86% of Denmark's population of over 5,840,045 was of Danish descent, defined as having at least one parent who was born in Denmark and has Danish citizenship.

> The most recent Census in 2011 highlights that in England and Wales, 80 per cent of the population were white British > from 2001 to 2011, the percentage of the population of England and Wales that was White British decreased from 87.4% to 80.5%

And I imagine that white British population has gone down in the past 10 years.

Denmark is one of the most homogeneous country in Europe.

But to support your claim, Italy is even more homogeneous than Denmark, around ~91% of the population is "Italian" and yet we can't even agree that southerners and northerners are the same people.

I think that in Denmark a small population living in highly dense cities with high homogeneity helps.


I've visited Italy quite a bit and been there for nearly two months in aggregate, spanning all regions in the north, and in the south spent weeks in parts like Puglia and Campagnia. My impression was that culturally, the Italians in the south are VERY different from the Italians in the north.

Even just the different driving style was very apparent.

Wouldn't you say that the cultural experience in a random village in Puglia will be very different from the random village in Trentino?


I am Italian, from Rome, but lived everywhere in Italy, from North to South, sometimes for long periods, sometimes for as long as a week.

What you noticed is true, but it's simply a reflection of past history, where Italy was a group of villages/towns independent (and often at war) with each other.

Italians are often chauvinists and defend local over global, no matter the evidence.

But, truth is there are more Sicilians in Lombardy than in Sicily, Rome is the largest city of Abruzzo (there are more people from Abruzzi in Rome than in L'Aquila, the capital of the region ) so what happens is that they recreate their local culture where they go and slowly with times the traditions become a mix that incorporate both cultures.

For example in Milan, where I lived for the past 8 years, it's easier to eat Sicilian, Pugliese or Chinese than a typical Milanese cuisine, but it's almost impossible to find a good Roman restaurant.

On the other hand, locally, the separation is usually stronger, it's true that culturally a random village from Trentino is different from a random village in Sicily (and there are historical reasons, Trentino is kinda an outlier in Italy, it's been Italian for a relatively short period) but it's also true that a random village near Palermo is different from a random village near Siracusa.

My parents come from a small town 100kms South of Rome and in that same town the eastern and western part speak two different variations of the same dialect and also the typical dishes are different. they are only fee kms apart.

My point is that in Denmark homogeneous population is only part of the reason, the most important one is being historically a united country under the same traditions that are valid throughout their territory and keep them together. Also a small population makes it easier, Denmark has the same population of an Italian region like Lazio, where, more or less, the culture is uniformally the same and the roman culture is more prominent than the rest of the country.


The UK is like Sweden, but Denmark (and Finland) are much more homogenous. And Sweden only retains social trust because it was still homogenous 20 years ago, most people don't realize they essentially live in Rio.


What the fuck are you talking about?

I'm a naturalised Swede, coming originally from Brazil, so I have plenty of hands-on experience to both be offended as to ask what the fuck are you talking about because it's a hugely racist take on multiple layers.

Let me know exactly your points on how Sweden is essentially Rio, I'd love to hear it.


I'm saying that:

1. Sweden is not the same as Denmark/Finland, it's not homogenous at all anymore, in that sense it's very similar to the UK

2. Social trust is still relatively high in Sweden (because of inertia) but it's eroding very quickly with increased heterogeneity and crime.

There's nothing racist about pointing this out, it's just a fact. Homogenous societies have much higher trust. I don't think this is racial, I think it's cultural.

When you have a very large inflow of people from completely different cultures, mostly with little education and without any ties to the host country, that will obviously create tension, and trust between people of the same culture, that speak the same language, is of course higher than between complete strangers, like a protestant Swede and a Muslim from Syria. Or even a Christian from Syria.

Sweden used to be a very safe country, with little crime and little inequality, and a homogenous culture. Now it's very quickly turning into a very unsafe place, with increasing inequality as immigrants form a huge underclass, while the upper middle classes have profited from exploding house prices, and the rich getting much much richer.

In many locations a majority of children don't speak Swedish at home, school results are plummeting.

Sweden has gone from a country where few people locked their doors to a society where the police recommends you to not wear jewellery in public, women are advised not to walk home alone and home invasions are booming. The well-off build safe rooms and hide in gated communities.

Does any of this sound familiar from Rio?


I think I will need some hard data and facts rather than your report. No, none of what I live or hear about in Sweden is anywhere close to Rio, that's my point on racism: you are exaggerating an issue that is not close at all in terms of impact and pervasiveness and using both points to push a racist narrative, that immigrants are causing the downfall of Sweden.

Yes, many of your points have some factual basis behind them but the exaggeration you take them up to is simply the rallying point of the far-right in Sweden, repeating those as if they are causing the doom of society is just fostering their agenda.

Immigration is an issue? Yes in some senses, not in others. You know what is much worse for Swedish society well-being and erosion of the social web? Neoliberalism policies, pushed since the 90s, to the 2000s and onwards. This creates huge fractures in society as you can watch with wealth inequality getting even higher.

Sweden is still, by all accounts globally, a very safe country. Does it have issues that were exacerbated by a huge influx of immigrants? Yes, of course, but Sweden also requires a large swath of ever-dwindling low-skilled workforce, jobs that no Swede would do for the pay are currently taken by immigrants. These immigrants are then able to access the larger system of education for their kids, which will in a generation or two bump them up.

I know that works because I have numerous friends coming from refugee families from Chile, Ethiopia, etc. that are 2nd generation here, and they became lawyers, architects, and so on.

All of your talking points are very similar to the propaganda pushed by SD so I believe you are caught in some echo chamber of those types. Please, get out of that, the world is not so gloomy and Swedish society is not destined to doom. It will be though if this type of narrative keeps being pushed.

You've never lived in Rio, the situation is much much worse than simply "don't wear jewelry and lock your doors"-type of issues... You simply can't grasp it and it's ok, you haven't experienced it in a way that's shaped and molded you as an adult.


I must warn you, I haven't lived in Sweden for almost a decade so saying that I'm saying the same things as "the far right extremists" in SD (who is actually a Social-Democratic party) doesn't really work. I really don't care if Nazis, Communists or cannibals share my concern.

> Sweden also requires a large swath of ever-dwindling low-skilled, workforce, jobs that no Swede would do for the pay are currently taken by immigrants

Which is more correct do you think:

1. Before mass immigration, Sweden had no dish washers, garbage collectors or cleaners, so we had to open the borders to cheap labour.

2. When we imported cheap labour, salaries for low skilled work imploded (sort of the point) and THEN Swedes stopped wanting to do these jobs for lower pay.

> Neoliberalism policies

What aspect of this, apart from importing cheap labour, do you think has "created huge fractures"? Sure, too many companies have been privatised, lots of first world corruption. But what could possibly be more disruptive than replacing a third of the population with low skilled, low paid people from completely different cultures?

> These immigrants are then able to access the larger system of education for their kids, which will in a generation or two bump them up.

This is not happening in Sweden to any useful extent and you are probably perfectly aware of that. School results for 2nd generation immigrants are abysmal, and criminality for many groups is sky high. Politicians have promised that "integration will work soon and the investment will pay off" for 40 years now, but it hasn't materialised. What makes you think it will ever happen?

> You simply can't grasp it and it's ok, you haven't experienced it in a way that's shaped and molded you as an adult.

I haven't even been there, I was flippant. But I think we should turn this around. I grew up in Sweden when it was the safest place on Earth, you grew up in Brazil. Who do you think has a better understanding of the decline of Swedish society? Do you think that perhaps you might be judging it by Brazilian standards, and that's why it's not "gloomy"?

> Sweden is still, by all accounts globally, a very safe country.

It's probably still safer than Rio, but it's definitely not "safe":

https://rmx.news/article/sweden-is-the-most-dangerous-countr...


What is that based on? It seems circular: You blame 'heterogeneity' (a concept based on a myth), it is having no effect, so therefore people just must not realize it.

> Rio

What do you mean by that?


One reason for the previously very high trust that existed in Sweden is the homogenous population. Everyone spoke the same language, knew the same songs, had the same values. (Other reasons could include protestantism, the cold climate, low crime rates etc).

When the population is becoming very diverse, and as crime is increasing, trust falls. This is not speculation, it is well known. And it's happening in Sweden, it's just trailing behind. People over 40 grew up in one of the safest countries in human history, so it takes time for them to adjust to the new reality. In 30 years, trust in Sweden will approach Rio.


> When the population is becoming very diverse, and as crime is increasing, trust falls. This is not speculation, it is well known.

Diversity causes crime to increase? That's only 'well known' among people who oppose those who are different than them.


In the case of Sweden it's not a secret that crime has increased exactly because of immigration, since some immigrant groups are extremely over represented in crime stats.

Looking at crimes in general, people with both parents born outside of Sweden are about 3x more likely to commit crimes, and the over representation is even higher for violent crimes.

Looking at violent rape, 75% of assailants were born outside Europe.

There are very extensive statistics on this, and unfortunately they don't go away no matter how much you love people "that are different". Even calling people racists doesn't work, believe me they tried.


Rather, the media monopolies prior to 1980 suppressed nationalistic viewpoints.


I am convinced that the way to change the world (not necessarily towards some altruistic nirvana but at least to avoid a dysfunctional, environmentally and socially disastrous dystopia) is by raising our education / communication game towards more honesty and transparency when discussing socioeconomic challenges and less obfuscation inane, monkey chest beating like conflicts.

Already any discussion that centers around "capitalism" is deeply problematic as it invariably takes enormously complex sets of laws, conventions and behavioral attitudes that varies materially (both historically and regionally) and forces it into a binary yes/no universe. You can't solve complex problems with random hammer blows on each others heads.

All of the constituent components of what we term "market democracy" must be examined not as what they say on the label, but what happens in practice. Just as a simple and single example: when politicians routinely enter revolving-door appointments to serve private interests how can we even pretend this is a feature of "capitalism".

The true underlying behavior is cooperating private gangs marauding the commons. It doesn't matter if it happens in ultra-capitalist US or "communist" China.


> So how do you change the world without capitalism? The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.

That would work for a year or two, until you had egalitarianized the money so everybody had the same amount. Then what? And what would be the effect of that?


Everyone wouldn’t have the same money. 80 years ago we taxes the rich around 80% on their over all income, then thatcher and regan paved the way to the world we have now, which is obviously having issues.

I may have come off overly negative toward capitalism because I posted early in the morning, but my general point was that it’s the only economic engine that works.

It sort of breaks down when it’s not regulated though, which is why I think we’re seeing so many issues tied to financial inequality in the world today.

I don’t think the solution is for everyone to have the exact same amount of money, but I struggle with how you can look at the current state of the world and think that it’s great. We need to help poor people get better opportunities, without ruining the systems we have for everyone else. I mean, history has shown us again and again what happens if we don’t.


>> So how do you change the world without capitalism? The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.

> That would work for a year or two, until you had egalitarianized the money so everybody had the same amount. Then what? And what would be the effect of that?

The only way to tax wealthy people is to remove all differences in wealth??


People who bash capitalism after the last century of expansion should just be considered negationists at this point.

Sure it is not perfect but it's infinitely better than any other economic model available.


That was sort of my point, but I may have drowned it in a little too much negativity.

I do however think we should work with capitalism as a model though. It’s quite obvious to me that it needs a strong political regulator to make sure it doesn’t run amok. I’m not against inequality for the sake of being against it, but I do recognise that too much inequality and too few opportunities for a lot of folks is potentially dangerous.


people who defend capitalism on the face of the last century's (and ongoing) environmental disaster should just be considered negationist at this point.

Sure is not all wrong but it's infinitely worse than any economic model that actually secures a sustainable future


Yes, good thing we had USSR and still have China that were (is) very environment-conscious!


So capitalism is infinitely worse than the one-child policy?


Please stick to intelligent discussion. I didn't specify an alternative model for a good reason, it doesn't exist yet.

But your attempt to pre-empt that the only possible alternative is Chinese style state-sponsered capitalism illustrates the paucity of your imagination or the malice of your intentions


You spoke of the environment as your goal, and said that “any” economic option that was sustainable (presumably regarding the environment) was “infinitely” better. I gave just one example that meets your criteria that popped into my mind. If you don’t like it, then perhaps consider adjusting your original claim. You’re the one that said it would be better.


> I didn't specify an alternative model for a good reason, it doesn't exist yet.

There are plenty of alternatives to what the US does. You can see them in other politically and economically advanced countries, which achieve far better results. You can see them in relatively recent US history.


by all accounts those "other" advanced countries offer a better socioeconomy model for how to organize things. The (recent) US is really an outlier that makes no sense whatsoever.

But there is a weakness in this view, namely the enormous security (and energy) dependency of those "other" countries on the US. It is a coupled system, making it hard to isolate what the standalone merits of the various modelw


Well, we're not going to have double-blind controlled empirical data. However, the other countries are easily wealthy enough to fund their own militaries at this point, without significant economic impact (right after WWII, it was a different story - the US produced half of the world's economic output, IIRC).


> I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually helping the world move in the right direction as far as climate change goes.

Isn’t this also exactly what causes crony capitalism. How many of these semi-rich investors, have friends in politics making regulations that will benefit these.

The fact that this is a thing ensures that a percentage of our politicians pimping climate change are not doing so because they care about the environment but because they’re pimps exploiting those below them for their own profit.

Otherwise we’d welcome and fund even fossil fuel nuclear, and gas, technologies alongside the green technologies. The modern car IC engine, is proof that there are even gains to be made while still not being fully green.

But they need to make it super scary, so they can profit more. One day I hope we can see all the money they made in roundabout ways from these green companies (and big pharmaceutical with covid by the way)


It’s also what regular capitalism looks like.


Regular capitalism is when you decide between having your cake or eating it.

Crony capitalism occurs when people start to want to have their cake and eat it too.

Capitalism’s basis is that everyone is a servant. This means we’re all lower than the king, but we are also are kings ourselves. However crony capitalism occurs when a servant makes himself greater than his master, when the greatest king and master of all showed the way to prosperity was by becoming the greatest servant.

Our politicians character is proof that capitalism has failed, because they want to be kings, but they do not want to be servants.


Regular capitalism always becomes crony capitalism, and then probably neo-fuedalism.


Regular capitalism doesn't exist


SSNs are generated by a not very secret algorithm. They were explicitly designed to be public information.

You don't need a data leak to get someone's SSN.

Also, malicious actors are almost never targeting you specifically. It is enough for them to

1) choose a birthdate

2) generate all SSNs associated with that birthdate

3) get all employment/salary histories accessible with that info.

4) scan the list for interesting tagets

5) ...

6) profit


And you'd need to know a past employer, right? I couldn't seem to find a way to get access to the info without inputting an employer first.


Many people post their professional career on LinkedIn. Again, it seems easy to find this information through public sources.


Yep, 100% agree.


Good catch, I'll add that.


Or send them a CCPA data deletion request: https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/equifax.com. This will generate a request email. You can then change the wordings to indicate that you are interested in deleting your salary history data.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of YourDigitalRights.org.


What are the potential ramifications for submitting a request on your site when you don't have residency in one of the listed areas?


Worst case they wont deal with your request.


Great site, I just used your service to email "Right to Access Request (Section 110 of the CCPA)" to Equifax.

Question / suggestion -- Have you considered monetizing by allowing lawyers specializing in CCPA / consumer privacy issues to advertise on your site?


Interesting suggestion. We're not interested in advertising, but would consider collaborating with law firms that work in this space (consumer protection / privacy). I have a lot more to say about this so message me if you're interested.


Nice site. You should probably update it for Brexit though. There are two GDPRs, for now.


The dropdown has options for "GDPR (UK)", "GDPR (EU)" or "CCPA" so they have actually already done this.


But, I didn't opt in for them to have this information about me to begin with.


>But, I didn't opt in for them to have this information about me to begin with.

Everyone is up in arms about Facebook and Google collecting our information... meanwhile credit bureaus are sitting in the shadows giggling to themselves


The obsession with "big tech" as the biggest abuser of consumer privacy frustrates the hell out of me, and must be a real delight to credit bureaus, cell carriers, data brokers, fintech parasites, and all the rest of the slimy fuckers who do far worse things every day and aren't even on the public's radar.


Reporting an employee’s salary vs Zuckerberg selling your political motivations to manipulate elections are two different ballparks. It’s not that people aren’t frustrated with other abusers of customer privacy, it’s just big tech is the best at it.


The Big Techs that run on ad revenue typically keep user data to themselves, and offer advertisers a platform for targeting ads without knowledge of individual users. There have been some scandals (CA is the one I always think of, and there are more) but typically selling de-anonymized user data is not the business model of these companies. That doesn't stop people from saying it is, but AFAIK they are largely incorrect.

Contrast that with e.g. the somewhat recent revelations that cell carriers have been selling individuals' granular, de-anonymized location history data to, essentially, anybody willing to pay.

From a privacy standpoint, which I think is the context here, I consider the latter sort of thing to be far worse.


They are 2 very different ballparks in that I would much rather let FB sell my info which I provide willingly than a credit bureau sell my salary history, which I don't.


Also Facebook doesn't sell anyone's info!


Facebook doesn't sell your info. You cannot buy people political affiliations on fb.


You forgot the worst of them all, the government!


Well yeah -- did you think it was somehow about consumer rights?

Democrats and Republicans alike want to use the threat of regulation and anti-trust action to force social media companies to adopt moderation policies favorable to them. They both recognize (IMO correctly) that they must make these threats; principled adherence to economic liberty leaves one without leverage and is likely to result in companies simply caving to one's opposition (c.f. the behavior of most companies with respect to China).

Credit bureaus don't influence elections, ergo there is little advantage to be gained by making threats against them.


I don't think it's a both sides issue. Regulating social media companies for a politically favorable environment is largely a Republican adventure.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/12/01/texas-social-media-l...

https://www.flgov.com/2021/05/24/governor-ron-desantis-signs...


You don't need to. Your employer can give this info to whoever they want, and many give this data to Equifax or one of the other credit agencies.

Also, you might give your bank employment details, and your bank will most likely send that info to a credit agency as well.

There's not much of an escape.


Opt out of the system as soon as you possibly can. No mortgage, no bank, no address, no traditional job.


Or, combine with other people to fight the ridiculous system? Even if you manage to pull off a life like this, you're limiting yourself significantly and leaving many people behind.


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Where do you live now? Is it the least shitty place you've lived? And if not, where?


> It's impossible, people are not rebelling after being forced in their homes for two years

Did you ever get the news that the world went through a pandemic and millions of people lost their lives? We all hate being cooped up at home but what's the alternative? What did you expect the governments to do when they had no other solutions?

When you talk about good countries, please remember that their citizens make them so. If you ever happen to move to one of these "good" countries, please remember that these societies are built upon a collective realization that rights come with a set of moral duties and obligations towards each other. By staying inside, we bought old, sick and immune-compromised people some time till a vaccine arrived.


No mortgage and no job are achievable.

You kind of need a bank, if you go around with cash the police or other criminals can just seize it.

You also may want an address to live somewhere, I'd rather live in a house than in a car.


Have a mailing address that is in the same city but not your residential address.


If I bundle my personal information together into an nft and then buy that nft, could I issue the credit agency with a DMCA takedown notice?


Aren't NFTs essentially just file hashes/signatures that can be associated with a public/private key pair on a blockchain? If so, the link between the NFT and the key pair might be solid (as in cryptographically secure) but the link between the NFT and its "underlying asset" (which might be copyrightable) seems flimsy.

That being said, since both NFT ownership and our legal systems rely on consensus and majority opinion, it's not hard to imagine a corrupt society in which the opinion of judges is disregarded in favor of blockchain consensus.

Edit: you might be joking but it's an interesting question nonetheless because it highlights how various systems compete for legitimacy :)


IANAL

The NFT would be completely irrelevant here. Basically I assume you are claiming copyright over your salary and personal information. Unfortunately you can't trademark facts, so this approach isn't viable.


Try it and let us know!


What exactly do employers and banks stand to gain from sharing this information? Is it an exchange of information for money?


For employers it offloads employment and salary verification. Instead of having to pay someone to answer verification calls all day they just upload the data to The Work Number and let them handle it.


Are employers obligated to provide employment and salary verification?


If they didn't their employees would be pretty pissed when they're unable to get a mortgage.


So go to HR and say "please sign this form that says I make $X" rather than preemptively broadcasting it?


Here's how I imagine this goes down:

ADP Rep: "Hey, we have an exciting new feature to offer you! We partner with the worlds premiere credit and employment reporting agency to eliminate the hassle of salary and employment verification."

VP, HR: "Go on..."

ADP: "If you opt in to this innovative program, you'll never again have to respond to your employees' lenders or landlords. 97% of banks participate in this program. Instead of them asking their applicant—your employee—for paperwork that you have to deal with, they come direct to the source automatically. Again, this is at no additional cost. It's included with our Premium Payroll Plus offering. Interested?"

HR: "Yeah, of course. One less thing I have to deal with"

ADP: "And the best part is you'll then qualify for a substantial discount on our partner's Employment Data System. Rest easy with unlimited verification reports for all your prospective new hires"

HR: "Anyone ever turn this down?"

ADP: "Almost never."


This is exactly what happened when I applied for a mortgage here in Ireland. Seemed fine.


Banks and organizations that are considering lending you credit (i.e. buying a house / car / getting a credit card) can know if you're getting in over your head with finances and might be higher risk to repay. They can set their interest rates and fees appropriately.

Although all that said for any major loan the bank is going to ask you to provide detailed proof of all income, assets, etc. They likely use this service as a check to make sure you aren't trying to overstate your income.


From what I recall at my time there, banks use it as supplemental source of creditworthiness validation. The government also pays for the data to verify eligibility for welfare and other social services. Employers...I don't think were a major revenue source although I wouldn't be surprised if some used it to inform their salary thresholds.


theworknumber.com is yet another symptom of a much larger problem in that it is currently impractical for a regular person to enforce their rights via the court system.

According to Peter Thiel “If you’re a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system...” https://theintercept.com/2016/10/31/trump-fan-peter-thiel-sa... So never-mind the non-millionaires.

However it is really nice to see efforts by some regular people out there setting up services such as https://yourdigitalrights.org which is the service I just used to request my information from Equifax. It will be interesting to see what comes of it. I suppose if they do not respond in 45 days I'll file a complaint with the CA Attorney General to put yet another ping regarding Equifax on their radar. https://oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-busine...

This shows that ultimately it is the regular people who drive progress, while the powerful and the wealthy just take credit for it.

Ultimately United States will transition to European-style privacy laws when it comes to private information like income and these credit agencies will be abolished, but the way to get there is for the regular non-millionaire people to exercise whatever "rights" they kinda have to ultimately get these annoyances shut down.


So a new company you are joining can easily verify your current salary with your ssn & dob. Right? They have your history of employers from your resume already.


That's not legal under the FCRA unless you've given them written permission.

Though some companies will do a background check on all new hires (again, with your permission) which would include employment verification.


And that's a critical point to remember.

Get the job offer and negotiate salary before agreeing to a background check. Let them make the offer be contingent on the results of those checks (and drug screen or security check or whatever else they want).

But before turning in notice on your current job, wait until all checks are completed and make them reissue the offer letter with all contingencies removed. Otherwise you're still at risk of them pulling the offer while you're busy packing up your desk.


Just also want to point out that freezing might result in certain parties that you do want to verify your employment from being able to do so.

If you're in the process of buying a house, you might want to hold off on this freeze until your mortgage has been approved. Might be true if you re refinancing or buying some else that requires a significant loan.

I'm not entirely sure if what I've stated above is true, but I've had to use theworknumber in the past when going through the mortgage process.


What are the consequences of doing this? What conclusion do HR departments draw about a person who freezes their employment information?


Are there other agencies we have to do this for as well?


I checked earlier today and yep, my employer is selling my data and future earnings potential to the company that is infamous for poor data security.

A confounding factor is that as a hiring manager, and at least for all the hiring decisions I have been involved in, I know we did not use this to check candidates. So what's the upside?

EDIT: ADP Workforcenow appears to do this automatically. I'm curious to find out if anyone in our company even knows it is happening. I will find out soon enough, as this is definitely a hill to die on.


I've seen how this works before, and what happens is all the companies submit their data to equifax, equifax then goes and creates a set of "profiles" for example "Junior software engineer", take all the data for employees with software engineer related titles and less than 3 years of experience, remove outliers and sell the result to employers as "salary band information". The result is that your employer gets a number saying "Junior software engineers in X location earn from 80,000 to 110,000" and that's used by your HR team to ensure that you don't drive up salaries by over offering. The role of equifax in this is to act as a level of protection, because the actual resultant behaviour is all the software companies working as a cartel to limit employee wages.


We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. . . We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of.

- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations


Pave (https://www.pave.com/) is another startup doing this


I worked in a two person company last year where I ran payroll with ADP.

It's there for me too, and I don't recall opt in permission on this.


Just to add another data point, our startup uses Gusto and my salary isn't in the data. My old salary from Google (which I think used ADP) is though.


"Do you agree to allow your data to be shared with 3rd parties as necessary to provide you with the best service possible?"

[races off to something much worse than you imagined with your data]


Three-person company here. We do our own payroll, using Quickbooks (not their payroll processing service, just Quickbooks the desktop application). We have employees in two states.


But is your salary data on this equifax site?


Is your info listed?


you know, I spoke with a company not too long ago and they gave me an offer that was 30% lower than what I currently make. The gap was entirely due to not accounting for public company RSU grants (that I had already mentioned)

In hindsight I wouldn't be surprised if their department used this tool to check my current cash income and automatically generated an offer. I wouldn't trust this data for much, and I can almost guarantee that someone in HR/Finance thinks their clever for using it.


The report tells you in the last 24 months who has looked at this info, so you could check that.


OMG, those companies… They should monetize tracking the tracker. And then they can monetize that.


what report? where?


Equifax is the Dow Jones Chemical of the data world. They have a tendency to mess up catastrophically yet they keep surviving by some miracle!


Ask HR how you should verify your employment and salary for a mortgage application. I know my company intentionally shares since they ask you to use the work number to send a verification to the lender.


The whole "verify your salary with employer" process is BS. Lenders can verify income by requesting your tax returns, and N recent pay stubs (source: I own my employer and have verified income this way, since obviously they are not going to call myself up and ask me to verify my own income). This is only about reducing their verification costs. If there needs to be a giant database of everyone's income, the government should run it, and they already have the data.


If you verify with tax returns, it would be easy to borrow money from a friend and count it as income every year just for loan qualification. And then borrow more money from a bank, wait 6 months for seasoning, and use it as down payment to buy real estate.

And if the loan gets sold to the government, it needs to meet government underwriting criteria and the lender has no free will. Especially for residential mortgages: No private business cares about 3% interest on a loan, they sell those to the government and make money on the origination fees.

If you get a hard money loan, they'll only ask for tax stubs but you'll also pay 10-12% interest. If the buy is really good sometimes they don't even care about taxes or ability to repay - they get your equity if you default so who cares if you make a dumb decision? It's mainly the government loans where they really try to avoid defaults.


> If you verify with tax returns, it would be easy to borrow money from a friend and count it as income every year just for loan qualification.

1) Where do I make friends with people who have such large piles of cash laying around they're willing to front me stacks large enough so I can lie and claim it as income on my taxes to inflate the size of the loan I can get? Multiple years in a row?

2) Once I claim it as income, I owe about a third of it to the federal and state governments in the form of.. income tax. Is my friend okay with only getting about 70% of each loan back after each tax season?

I mean, if my rich friend loans me $100K each year, after three years (the number of tax returns I had to show for my last mortgage), He'll have lost about $90K on the deal... wouldn't have just been easier for him to gift me the $90K the first year and I could put it towards my house and then not needed such a large loan in the first place? It'd have saved us all three years of hassle.


I don't want to derail the thread into discussing exact mechanics. I just think if most people underwrote loans according to their intuition, they'd lose a lot of money. And a tax return is controlled by the same person applying for the mortgage, so is less valuable than the same information split among two people.


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The FBI has a bullet point "Silent Second" on their page about mortgage fraud, so people have borrowed money for their down payments in the past and been prosecuted for it. That's not a new idea.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/white-collar-crime/mortgage-...

For the income taxes, my first thought would be "sell an NFT for $200k to a friend", now it's a gain on sale of property that can be offset by buying real estate in an "opportunity zone". Later, your friend can even claim a tax deduction when it gets "stolen".

He's self-employed with a business. So $200k in annual sales to his friend, and then he purchases $200k of equipment depreciated over 5 years from the same friend but split among 12 different shell companies so it's not obvious. He does pay taxes the first year, but gets it back over the next 4 years.

That page mentions leasing from the owner at inflated rates, and then getting it appraised at a multiple of the profit. It's not a direct example, but does use inflated income transferred between friends. They probably wouldn't mind paying taxes on the lease income during that time, since the multiple is often 20x.


"Friends" might be a misnomer, these are usually fraud rings/criminal organizations.


>If you verify with tax returns, it would be easy to borrow money from a friend and count it as income every year just for loan qualification.

Huh? Isn't it fraud to declare something as income that's not actually income? Also, if you declare something as income, don't you have to pay tax on it? So this scheme will mean you have to pay a bunch of taxes you wouldn't have to otherwise. This sounds like the opposite type of fraud people do. People usually under-report income, not over-report it.

"Yes IRS, I made $1T last year." "Ok cool, send us $400B in taxes please."


> Isn't it fraud to declare something as income that's not actually income?

Mortgage fraud is a thing that exists, so it's not like labeling it as a crime lets you forget about it.

> don't you have to pay tax on it?

If you're borrowing at 30x leverage like some government loans give, taxes on the down payment is a small increase in cost-of-leverage which is more than made up for by the reduced interest rates.

Anyways, my point is, there's good reason to look at the same income viewed in multiple ways. Adding an employer into the mix is at least a separate person(which is probably why they waived the requirement in OP's case), while tax returns are filed by the potential fraudster/"entrepreneur".


If you're "borrowing" money from a friend to bump up your income, you're likely going to bump yourself up into a higher tax bracket and end up paying more money in taxes.


On the money you borrowed. Moving into a higher tax bracket does not mean you pay the higher rate on all earning, but rather only marginal earnings in the higher bracket.

Regardless, it doesn't make sense to pay taxes on borrowed money. I'm not sure this scheme is real.


10-12% is higher than my credit card APR is that really what hard money loans are going for now?!


The US average is a above 16%.


Yeah, I used the work number thing to verify my salary for my mortgage.


As in you had to interact directly with work number for that? Or do you mean that lender “magically” knew and pre-populated your salary info during application process?


Not the parent, but my lender magically knew with just my name, position, company, and SSN. FWIW


No, I contacted my work to get my ‘work number’, and then gave that to my mortgage lender.


Great idea!


We had some schmuck HR consultant come in to a startup I was previously working for and their primary job duty was implementing ADP.

Glad to know they chose a product that involuntarily sold out my HR information.


Very interesting, I didn't expect the accuracy and detail in this data.

All of my pay from Intel, Google, Facebook is in here. Qualcomm apparently did not report.

Also, Google (my latest employer) pulled the data just before I started working, after giving me an offer. My credit card company pulls the data every month, sometimes 2-3 times per month. Several mortgage originators have also pulled the data even though I have not gotten a mortgage (I probably filled out a form on their website).

I guess I'm okay with credit card companies monitoring this, but I'm not sure I am okay with potential employers having access to this. Is it even legal in California for them to read this information? Maybe it was legal at the time but not any more?


> I'm okay with credit card companies monitoring this

I'm not. If they want to know, they can ask me for a paystub.


Credit card companies do ask for permission to pull financial information from brokers when you sign up.


What if you say no?

It's not really consent if declining affects your chances of getting credit or, worse, employment.


Yes it is, this is literally how credit works. You convince them you're credit worthy, they give you credit. If you don't like the particular information a credit company needs to trust you, then you try a different credit company.

I don't follow how declining a credit company would affect your employment, is there something I'm missing there?


Having credit is not optional in modern society.


In the US, where credit cards are notably popular, 70-72% of people have a credit card. In other countries, it is less than this.


Even if you don't have a credit card you may have a mortgage, or a car loan, or a business loan, or...

To have none of those things in the US you must be either very rich, very poor, or dependent on someone else who does.


Many people rent and buy cars with money they have saved. Some others, use public transportation. While many middle-class people take advantage of credit, it is not a requirement to participate in modern society. It is optional, in any normal sense of the word. Search "debt-free lifestyle" and you'll find blogs of many who advocate for living this way.


If this data is available to some parties, it will eventually be available for everyone interested. Especially when we are talking about Equifax, there should be no doubt.


You simply don't get approved for a credit card if you say no. They won't even accept your application without permission to pull your data.


If they pulled salary info after making an offer, then this is likely qualified as verification of data that prospective employee submitted. They can probably revoke that offer if one provided misleading info during application.


That's some shady behavior though. The whole point of the law is to prevent companies from penalizing employees based on prior salaries. Wouldn't be surprising if Google was finding excuses to retract offers based on seeing that they "overbid" on someone's comp. If anyone has had suspicious stuff like this happen, it sounds like it'd make a great lawsuit.

Would be nice if some journalist(s) made a big stink out of Google finding a loophole in this employee protection law.


I'm currently interviewing for a new role, and I've already been told my expected salary is too low for me to be a senior engineer. Hardly my fault I didn't know to ask for a higher amount?!

Will obviously be challenging this if I get an offer...


just work for 4 months and job hop.

If they play games, play them too.


The scenario I had in mind would pertain to California where they aren’t allowed to ask your salary history. So if one didn’t not disclose salary info, then offer was likely not based on that info (nor on work number info). In which case they can’t pull offer due to misleading salary info. However, all bets are likely off in states with no such protection…


Well I'm pretty sure I did consent to it, at least.


Does the system not ask for SSN to pull this data? If yes, how did Google get your SSN?

Disc: Googler.


At the very least you need to provide proof of your SSN before you start employment in the US (as a US citizen at least). This is required for your social security benefits and some tax info. I believe in most states you actually have to physically show your social security card on the first day of employment now too.


I think you are thinking of form I-9, which is federally required. SS Card is one of may accepted forms of ID, I always use my passport instead.


That form also requires your SSN (or equivalent ITIN for non-citizens).

Using your passport doesn't obviate the requirement that they have your SSN or ITIN for the IRS.

The SSN card proves your eligibility to work, they still need to verify your ID separately (DL, voter card, etc.). They need both pieces. A passport counts as both.


They need your SSN. Not specifically your SSN card. Source: lost my SSN card ages ago.


Correct, if you have a passport or other eligible documents that attest your right to work. Your SSN card counts as one of the eligible forms of attesting your right to work but not your ID.

Which is I think what I said. They still need your SSN, just not the card itself.


> SS Card is one of may accepted forms of ID

Are those still as I remember them - with no biometric information (like a photo) and basically no security features?


It’s not intended to be a secure ID. It’s meant to be the number by which you claim your social security benefits. It’s just warped into this ungodly mess because people use it as a “secure” number.


Yeah I had to get a replacement a couple months ago and it's the exact same flimsy little cardstock card as we've always had.


I provided that on the day I started. Not when I accepted my offer.


Pretty sure Google needs your SSN to be employed at the company. Whole I-9 form, withholding taxes, giving you a W2 and all that jazz...


When you start. From reading the GP's comment I felt this was done before they started.


Google asks for SSN for background checks and whatnot.


I guess. I always thought b/g checks are done via third party but I don't recall being asked for SSN during that step. It's been a while so I guess I am not remembering right. Thanks.


You're definitely asked for a social security number for a background check because it allows for more accurate data. You want to pull the background for the correct person, after all.


SSN and proof of citizenship are required for all US companies to employ someone. It's not just background checks.


IIRC Google requests SSN data for all applicants ahead of interview.


Nope. Didn't in my case.


If you work in the US you should be getting a W2 from Google in a month or two. The top left corner will contain your SSN or it's an invalid W2 because the IRS won't be able to verify this is your W2 when you submit it with your tax return.


Yes, as I said from the other comment, I provided that when I started. From GP's comment, I thought they are saying they had to provide the SSN before they started.


There are exceptions to this. For example, the W2 can state "Applied for" instead of having a number.


LOL. Google knows your SSN. They know everybody's SSN.


That's a good point, I wonder how many people googled their SSN or just typed it in the chrome URL bar


Does the data contain start and end dates for each employer?


Yes it does.


Can confirm it is 100% correct. Employed in Washington and California. All numbers were correct for the ones I cared about - more or less. They missed three jobs and the dates were fucked up for a few - but is pretty upsetting. Definitely should be illegal.

They even had pay period dates and everything for my current job. Including dates I was doing 401k. Like - what the fuck - why is my employer selling that information? It's a big tech company, of course. You could even see when my RSUs were vesting. The hell!

Funny enough - the only ones who have been looking at my data are Credit Karma. Maybe I should delete my account with them - lol. I use them for taxes because they are free.


"It's 100% correct, except for the errors"


Yeah - true. I could’ve corrected it to say - “100% correct about the shit I care about” but I figured someone would get a laugh out of someone replying with this kind of comment. Enjoy your upvotes.


I now better understand how Credit Karma can offer a free product.


Credit Karma's business model isn't somehow secret, they are very much upfront about it - https://support.creditkarma.com/s/article/Is-Credit-Karma-re...

They display ads for credit cards and other financial products on their site. They use your personal information to target specific financial products to you. Your credit karma ads are personalized.

I just wish I got better credit card offers from them; I haven't found any product they've advertised to be particularly enticing.


Yeah. That much I knew. So I’m not super peeved about it. More worried about what they’ll do with the info and if they’ll broker it out more. Didn’t think they’d get this level of info though tbh.

Oh - and their targeted ads are not very good… it’s kinda sad.


They don't share or resell anything. It's in the link I provided.

I'm sure their credit card partners request some protects to only be advertised to people in a certain income range, so it makes sense. They probably also use your income to populate the "your odds of approval" portion on their ads.

>their targeted ads are not very good… it’s kinda sad.

I think this is because they are advertising to the "everyman" who isn't very familiar with financial products.


Employers are outsourcing what should be an internal HR function of employment verification. Except in specific cases regarding government contractors, there is no legal requirement for employers to provide this data to a third party like TWN.


A few years ago there was a startup called Paysa. You searched by employer and it showed you the salaries of each job title. My company was small enough that it made it easy to see the salary of many of my employees. We did not initially understand where that data came from. I did not leak it. We put together that each leaked salary was of someone who had recently applied for a mortgage or auto loan.

Read the fine print next time you attach a paystub to a loan application. They are likely selling your data to aggregators.


What are my options though? I can't opt out of them selling my data, can I?


You might be able to pick a lender who does not sell your data. I have no idea.


I hope Zero Knowledge proofs become widespread over the next decade to prevent having to give companies your data. With them you'll be able to prove you earn over X amount without actually letting them know what you earn.


While I share the hope for such technologies (and hopefully some form of complete digital personal ID system in the same vein), that would require government mandates, which I think will be unlikely considering we can’t even get major investments for climate change, because the companies collecting this data benefit from it, and almost certainly won’t give it up willingly.


What is the impact of this to me personally?


It depends on how you feel about others knowing your income. Many people are very unhappy to have such information leaked.


Salaries are not a secret.

Ergo, as employees... Share your salaries.

Knowledge is power and if the only entities that have power from knowing salaries are your employers then you have no power.

And for people hiring, make hiring decisions that are defensible, equal, and would survive full transparency. Act as if every employee is already sharing salary info, for if they aren't today they will be soon.


Fully agree, but selling information to a for-profit company behind people's backs is not the way to ensure transparency.


Agreed. This information is more dangerous to companies than it is to employees.

If people figured out a way to get this same information for their colleagues to use for salary negotiation, companies would likely stop contributing the data.


Note that QuickBooks will now contribute to this data unless an employer explicitly opts out. I had to bring it to my employer's attention when they first rolled it out. Most small businesses that use QuickBooks won't have heard of it and will be contributing salary data by default.

https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-artic...


Straight from your link.

"No data is shared unless your employees specifically request it to be shared, usually as part of an application process for loans, credit, or public aid, or in response to a permissible purpose under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”), such as a court order."


I read that the first time as "no data is shared with verifiers", rather than "no data is shared with Equifax", but on a closer reading I believe you're correct: the data stays with QuickBooks until Equifax receives a request and they forward that request to QuickBooks. So they're not shipping data to Equifax en masse.

That somewhat mitigates the concerns of data being lost in another Equifax data breach assuming that Equifax only fulfills requests from verifiers that have received my express consent, and assuming that consent doesn't become mandatory for employment (which is the subject of the larger discussion on this thread).


I've used this before as an employee. While it may also be a bulk dataset of employment information (which any HRS or payroll provider would have), the ostensible use of this solution is, to quote their homepage, "credentialed verifiers with permissible purpose access to income and employment data".

Key words there are credentialed and permissible purpose.

In other words, it's an automated way for me as an employee to have my employer verify my employment and/or salary information—not necessarily both—without having to hunt down someone in HR. This is particularly useful for previous companies where I no longer have access to internal systems.

I have used it most commonly for mortgage applications.

I can log in and generate a one-time or limited-use code to provide access, and select which data I want to provide access to. I then provide that key to the third party, who verifies with Equifax.


I think the issue is - do companies who give them information also get access to it for people outside their org

Others have wrote this in the thread, but anecdotally I once tried to push up what I considered a low ball offer, and lied about my current comp. HR quickly said - no, thats not your current comp

I'm pretty sure they didn't reach out to my current company to ask, so the only other option was abusing a system like this


I very much doubt it. The "Salary data is for sale" title is misleading; There's no way for me to go pay Equifax for access to u/shmatt's data. They might have some aggregate datasets for sale, removing PII.

The same goes for credit data; you (largely) can't run a credit check on me without my permission.

This is an HR service to ease the burden of legitimate requests for employment or salary data that you, as an employee, request.

More logically, employers wouldn't want other companies to be able to access their payroll information for competitive reasons.

I can't explain your previous experience; perhaps you were at a company with firm pay bands, and they knew you were already at the top of your current one?


> you (largely) can't run a credit check on me without my permission

that is LOL incorrect. I know a car sales department lead, a licensed real estate broker who is also a rental apartment owner, and multiple small business owners that I suspect can all snoop on my US credit record pretty much at will. The second part of that is that each and every one of those people do lie on signed documents routinely, which apparently is normal.


Notwithstanding bad actors, the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires[1], among other things:

1. Only business entities with a specific, legitimate purpose can request / access a credit report.

2. Consent must be provided depending on use case.

"Soft pulls" (e.g., pre-screened CC offers) can be done without your consent. (You can opt out of these.)

A dealership finance office or lease broker would absolutely run your credit, and typically there are explicit forms you sign authorizing such a check as part of that business transaction authorized by you. "At will" checks outside of such transactions would appear to be in violation of FCRA.

Conversely, credit agencies are required to provide you a list of all inquiries upon demand, so you can see if those parties you mention actually are running your credit without your permission.

[1] https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0096-fair-credit-r...


> Notwithstanding bad actors

Isn't this a huge point developing here now? that in consumer finance, those who run the show routinely are shown cheating overall. What is the gain/pain ratio on cheating in consumer finance? The list of legal requirements and safeguards seem to get longer at the same time as cheating on them gets more common.

I am not at all convinced that the consumer is protected here. Multiple avenues -- some offshore using agents who operate blatantly outside the law, and secondly accountants and admins who get numb to daily cheating, and do more of it. I will go full YOLO and add that I think the waves of pain killer abuse and common alcohol culture, directly contribute to norms of low-level cheating over money like this, especially where it is "just data" and not actual money moving around.


100%. Lots of gray area here in "shouldn't", "illegal", "can't", etc.

That's why, in my experience, I think TheWorkNumber has a pretty good and individual-centric approach. I have to explicitly grant access to that data on a per-request basis with some form of one-time key that I provide to the requestor.

Compare that to a credit check, where ("if you're lucky") you sign something saying you're aware of and approve the request, but without any sort of real technical control.


> you (largely) can't run a credit check on me without my permission

In my country there are forums where every once in a while a guy with access to these credit systems shows up and starts literally taking requests. People post names and he reveals everything about the person's credit history. For free and in the open.

Wouldn't be surprised if it was just as easy in the US for some bank or employer to look up your entire financial history.


without having to hunt down someone in HR

When I worked for UPS they specifically told me there was absolutely no way that HR would verify salary/employment over the phone for mortgage applications and the only way to do it was via theworknumber.com. UPS has ~500,000 employees so you can understand why they'd want to offload this work to a third party. I was working with a smaller mortgage company so they grumbled about having to do it this non-traditional way but it all worked out in the end.


How does this work in California given that employers cannot ask for a candidate's salary even through an agent? Does this not qualify?

Effective January 1, 2018, Labor Code section 432.3 prohibits an employer from, either orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, asking any information concerning an applicant’s salary history information, which includes compensation as well as benefits. [1]

[1] https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/california_equal_pay_act.htm


It appears to be even more restrictive then that: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

> An employer shall not rely on the salary history information of an applicant for employment as a factor in determining whether to offer employment to an applicant or what salary to offer an applicant.

That being said, how do you enforce a provision like that in the face of every company having all information on every candidate, seeing that mind reading hasn't been invented yet.


Won’t eqifax tell you if someone requests the data therefore you can tell if the law is violated


I believe the point Beefy is making is that once they have your information, how can you prove that it was used in determining whether someone gets hired or how much their salary will be.


If it’s possible to sue for discrimination based on gender identity and orientation, why would it be impossible to sue for discrimination based on salary, if you have a record of prospective employer checking your salary records?


People in salary ranges are not a protected class; sexual orientation is protected.


Oh, interesting, thanks! And now I wonder if this includes compensation besides salary.


If you get RSUs - it does. It shows up in my payroll quite clearly as an obvious bump when I vest. You can even tell when I'm deferring for 401k.

It's absolutely fucked. I'm guessing this is an integration with ADP - who my current employer uses.


Sorry, to clarify, I meant in terms of whether any aspect of compensation can be legally used to influence how much non-salary compensation a company offers to a candidate.


It appears you might be able to have this information deleted if you’re a California resident and the CCPA protects your data rights:

https://myprivacy.equifax.com/personal-info

I’m not a California resident. Can someone who is try and report back? Sounds like a follow up blog post/instructional tutorial is needed if it works, and calls to state and local reps that this should be opt in.


thanks for sharing


Would equifax be the agent in this case?


That's one possibility I'm wondering about, I don't know.


If people are upset their employers are selling this information to Equifax, you know it would be a fantastic thing that an organized bargaining unit of all your fellow coworkers could demand your employer cease. Might be time to start talking to coworkers about this and many other things that upset you about your employer.


Or perhaps since your "private" salary data seems to be getting shared with anyone, why not just embrace it? Start sharing it with all your colleagues?


This. I think as I re-do my website, I'm adding my current salary next to my current position. Seems about the right thing to do.


Employer 1: Salary only. None of my bonuses or RSUs are included. Bonuses were over half my comp. RSUs were higher than salary at least one year.

Employer 2: Salary and bonus only (large tech co; over half my comp is rsus).

Employer 3: totally wrong.

On the plus side, I now understand why I've occasionally been low-balled and then called a liar when I explain why the offer isn't compelling...


That's a feature though. Who wants to work somewhere like that?


Wowwww. I was really reticent to give them the info to log in, and still not sure it was a good idea (although they have it anyway...), but it's interesting -- they have my current TC exact, RSUs and everything...and that little instruction line about how to garnish wages really gives you the feels...

Even better, the mystery of why a mortgage lender randomly asked me about my employment history from over two decades ago (i.e., working for my Mom!) is now solved! I was like, "How do you know I worked for my Mom in the 90s? And of all the jobs to ask about, why this?" Turns out only three employers show up over multiple decades of employment.

Happy to see that the payroll processor I used for awhile for our personal companies until I started doing it myself didn't share our data, but am now really worried about future control of it.


> Happy to see that the payroll processor I used for awhile for our personal companies until I started doing it myself didn't share our data, but am now really worried about future control of it.

Is there a way to find out which payroll processors or large companies report salary information to Equifax? Elsewhere in this thread people have mentioned that ADP, Intel, Google, and Facebook report, Qualcomm apparently does not… I would love to have a more complete list.


Me, too. But I do think, as others have mentioned, Intuit is definitely sharing data — my mother and I used the same payroll processor and my company payroll isn’t there (I don’t use QuickBooks).


For those curious, I requested my Employment Data Report. Here's what was in it:

Pages 1-2:

  Dear xxx,
  
  Thank you for requesting your Employment Data Report. Your Employment Data Report
  includes all employment data sent to The Work Number by your employer(s). An
  important document titled "A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting
  Act" is also enclosed. Great care has been taken to report this information correctly.
  Please help us in achieving even greater accuracy by reviewing all of the enclosed
  material carefully.
  
  Verifiers who have procured your data in the past 24 months -
  [list of organizations, including Credit Karma, JPMorgan Chase, American Express, ...]
  
  The information provided in this document is an unofficial report, intended for personal
  use by the employee-recipient only. It is not intended for verification purposes. Using this
  document for consumer verification purposes could constitute a violation of the
  Fair Credit Reporting Act and result in a monetary fine. If someone is asking you to
  provide verification of employment or income, please direct them to www.theworknumber.com.
  If you need further assistance or wish to dispute any information in your Employment Data
  Report, please contac -- page errors -- Please reference case number xxxxx.
  
  If you wish, you may also contact your employer(s) at the address indicated in each employment
  record below.
  
  Sincerely,
  The Work Number Service Team
  Attachment
  MM, MS
Pages 3-17:

  [pages and pages of complete up-to-date (2021 EOY) salary information,
  bonus breakdowns, title, employment status, division, state-specific
  disclaimers, and freeze instructions]
Snippet about freezing:

  A security freeze request may be sent via mail to:
  
  Equifax Workforce Solutions
  Attn: Employment Data Freeze
  3470 Rider Trail South
  Earth City, MO 63045
  
  You may also send a freeze request to:
  
  Email: TWNFreeze@equifax.com
  Phone: 1-866-222-5880
  Fax: 877-879-8182
  We will provide you with confirmation of the placement of your freeze.
  Please note that although some state laws may allow us to charge a fee,
  TALX Corporation never charges any fees to place or remove a security freeze.


When I fill out the form I get:

> We've encountered an error Sorry, this service is not currently offered to residents of your state. If you need further assistance, you can call Customer Care at (866) 295-6801. Customer Care is available 8 a.m. to midnight (ET), 7 days a week.

My state being Georgia.


How did you request the report?


https://myprivacy.equifax.com/personal-info


I find the EU approach so much better. Your personal data (which means anything that can be used to uniquely identify you as a person) is your property, and the default is "no permission to use".


Yeah. Information should be a massive liability. The more they know, the more it should cost them. These companies should be scrambling to forget everything about us before we're even out the door, not amassing information into huge dossiers to sell to the highest bidder. The unapologetic audacity of these people never fails to impress me.

GDPR has a major problem though. It allows use of data for "legitimate" purposes. Of course, all of these businesses think of themselves and everything they're doing as perfectly legitimate. I wouldn't be surprised if some lobbyist worked that loophole in.


> Of course, all of these businesses think of themselves and everything they're doing as perfectly legitimate.

That wouldn't be a major issue if privacy authorities actually a) acted on complaints in a timely manner, b) issued the "effective, proportionate and dissuasive" fines that the law requires.

Most importantly, I believe some DPAs have already stated that "legitimate interest" cannot justify online advertisement. Now they "just" need to take a snapshot of the most popular 10000 websites in their country, then start issuing fines.


That's presumably the default in the US too, but the workaround is for companies to have you agree to some fine print, which nobody reads. When you request a mortgage quote, submit a job application, submit a credit card application, etc., they just bury in there "you're agreeing give us permission to use your SSN to verify the information you've given" and they're golden.

The only way around would be some regulation like GDPR, but then we end up with something like cookie banners that are only annoying and don't give you a reasonable option to opt out. Just like if you want to get a mortgage, you can't opt out if every single lender does it.


In Germany we have our own data kraken though. See Schufa. Even with GDPR you're basically forced to hand data over to them.


That's a view through rose-colored glasses, GDPR isn't that powerful (and it only applies to user-supplied data, not all personal data). As a relevant example, in Sweden your taxable income is public information.


> As a relevant example, in Sweden your taxable income is public information.

Same in Norway. However taxable income does not equal salary. And at least in Norway, you can log in and see who requested the tax data about you, and companies can't mine this data.


The main problem with GDPR is that it is hard to enforce because the enforcing authorities are overworked, focusing on the wrong things, and bogging themselves down in their own bureaucracy.

> only applies to user-supplied data, not all personal data

I don't believe this is correct: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/

Maybe you're confusing this with the different lawful grounds for processing, and the fact that consent has quite strict requirements but there are other lawful grounds that don't require consent? https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/


> in Sweden your taxable income is public information.

GDPR protects against automated personal data processing, not against publishing of public - by the law - data.


I pulled my own data. Hilariously, it includes my 3 years at reddit with the official title "JavaScript Apologist", which is what I wrote for myself on the about page when I was developing it.


How hard was it to pull your own data? What are they looking for to validate you are you?


Legal name, SSN, birth date, address, phone number, username + password (with like 7 requirements)

Yet again SSN being used as the only real hidden data.


It’s hilarious that companies try to stop you from discussing your salary but at the same time they will give it away for free to a shady company.


Yes, this is completely not okay.


This is not okay.


Meanwhile in Norway, every citizen can check the income, wealth, and taxes statements of other citizens and companies.

https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/


Which is fine. The problem is asymmetric information. Employers have access to this data, but employees don't.


Interesting to read about the Norway's system! I would guess that "If you search for anyone, they can see that you did" is pretty fair but can hinder one's curiosity for searching the information.

Also interesting that public lists for media is no longer distributed. How have media outlets taken this?

Here in Finland Tax office publishes lists of all over 100k earners to media and they are published as public lists online [0]. In addition to that, anyone's income information can be accessed at tax offices or by phone, so this does not leave a trace [1].

After GDPR, one is allowed to prevent one's information to be released to media by objecting to this. However media can still access and release your data via phone or tax office's computer [2] and in 2021 media outlets won a case in Administrative Court where they can also get a list of those who objected [3]. So basically after tax records go public, journalists just take this list and make the calls.

But yeah, as SP mentioned, this is very different approach than in the link of this thread.

[0]: (in Finnish) https://www.is.fi/verotiedot/

[1]: https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/finnish-tax-administration/d...

[2]: https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/finnish-tax-administration/d...

[3]: https://yle.fi/news/3-11893060


In Norway if someone looks up your income you can see who did it since they need to login with an approved ID system linked to your social security number. So i practice most people do not look up other people they know.


That sounds like something that can easily be masked by going through a middleman.


You can check the financials of any company without registering: https://www.180.no/


> Also interesting that public lists for media is no longer distributed. How have media outlets taken this?

Media is free to write about, and have searchable lists, for parts of the info. Typically something that is of "public interest", e.g the highest earners.

The rules behind this I believe is a bit vague. I read up on the legal text for this now, and it basically states that they can get access to the lists as long as they sign an agreement where they, among other things, need to promise not to publish the full list.


> Typically something that is of "public interest", e.g the highest earners.

Oh okay, so then it is pretty similar than in Finland!


if this is really that - this is clearly evidence of collusion amongst employers with indirect pressure on them to keep salalries at a certain level


Exactly this. There's a reason using past salary history in employment is illegal in California.


Though you should know that doesn’t stop interviewers from asking.


Oh, I'm aware. I've had interviewers ask me questions that would make a lawyer wince if they overheard. It being a law should provide some incentives to not do illegal things, even if they are rarely enforced.


It's a b2b co., this is how they appeal to their clients. This is their product.


Not all commerce should exist


I agree


Are there equivalent services that broker data of citizens in other countries? As a non-American, my layperson understanding of American legislation is that it's extremely lax when it comes to protecting individuals from privacy invasions like this. Is anyone aware of laws in the EU/Canada/Australia that would prevent this kind of thing happening?


i've never seen this in Canada but even in the U.S., I don't think it's being misused the way that people are suggesting here.

I have referred thousands of callers to TheWorkNumber (and competitors like 'Thomas and Company') in my years working at a call centre and the reason is always the same: income verification for somebody who needs to get approved for a mortgage loan application or something else like that.

I don't actually see any suggestion that the salary data is being "sold" per se rather than just being used for legitimate income verification purposes


From what I read in EU the pay is considered personal information and is thus is protected by GDPR. If your employer wanted to share it with 3rd party for something like this, he would need your explicit approval for it.


Exactly this, plus you'd have the right at any time to inspect your own data, or withdraw permissions at any time.


I think in Sweden all tax returns are public.


Not just Equifax.

There are any number of consultancies that collect salary (and other compensation/benefits) data from many companies and then share that information with all their clients.

It's used as a method of putting downward pressure on salaries without explicitly colluding.


Isn't distributed collusion just collusion by another name? I keep hearing the argument that you can't trick the law by technological means. This seems to be an attempt at doing that.


For those who are surprised/outraged from a privacy perspective- the employment verification/background check/etc space is very VC hot. YC and its affiliates are surely investors in some players in this space? Maybe https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/checkr ?


> * Who has accessed the report in the past 24 months

so now your current and future employers can see if you've been talking to other companies? that's... wrong.


Wait can other parties see the view count too?


finally got in. that's unclear, it might just be for you. i'll have to ask an hr friend.


they said no, not something they'd seek. but that's an n of 1.


It sucks but no company would do a serious background check unless they already gave you an offer (which probably means you are out the door, so it’s irrelevant).


I'm glad to see this here. I found out about this from the employee side when I was asked to interact with the site, and when I dug deeper was shocked with what I saw.

I've been telling friends/colleagues but many didn't honestly believe me.

After I found out about this, I noticed a pattern in new jobs - they always knew exactly what offer to make me that was about 10% higher than my current salary. I mean, the offers were like clockwork. I strongly feel prospective employers were using this information to decide on what offer to make.

I can summarize my feelings about this pretty succinctly.... this is not ok.


How is this even legal? How do we make this no longer possible? It seems like we need a new law to stop this unapproved sharing.

Did we ever agree to this?


Your employer sold the data to equifax. There's no law that makes your income a secret. I agree it's ridiculous.


Hold the phone. Your employer PAID Equifax (Talx) to take this data off their hands.

source: me, having read the contract at megacap tech firm


In India there is National Skills Registry (NSR) by NASSCOM. Member companies require potential candidates to register and provide the registration number. This is then used by HR at member companies to track you around.

The best part is that in this case, it is the employees that pay for this, and that too as an yearly subscription! https://nationalskillsregistry.com/free-structure.htm

Finally, one of the cofounders of NASSCOM is Nandan Nilekani, the same guy who's the mastermind behind India's bio-metric surveillance program (my words) - Aadhar. Not surprising at all.


That last link says that data is exempt from CCPA.

> The Work Number® database is subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)

> Data that is regulated by the FCRA, as well as data used for employment purposes, is exempt from the CCPA.


Isn't this basically just federal law overriding state law?


That sounds wrong. TWN having this data is not a condition of my employment.


Correct. There's no legal requirement to give salary data or any employment data to a private third party CRA.


Oh wow, this is a total outrage. Details have been shared for about 80% of my previous employment, and many of those employers listed details on a per-pay period basis.

They even include my net pay after voluntary deductions, such as 401k!


In California it’s illegal for a company to use historic salary info for a hiring or salary decision[1], so who is equifax trying to sell to in CA? This seems like a very grey legal area where the obvious use for the data is illegal.

[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...


The law (paraphrased for brevity): It’s illegal to use salary history of an applicant to inform the hiring decision or salary offer of an applicant.

Whether there’s any value to the data depends on whether the “applicant” is the same human under the law. If I’m using the data to understand the market curve for a position, and to use that curve to inform my offer to all applicants, I’d wager that’s okay under the law, even if any specific applicant’s data is among the thousands of data points that went into that curve.

Let’s assume a good faith effort here, rather than a company trying to use tortured logic “we’re just trying to understand the salary curve for an SWE with SSN xxx-xx-xxxx”, that they’re trying to understand their local market and that specific SWE is 1 of 50,000 in the dataset and then happens to apply. I think that’s okay (both legally and morally).


Can you buy a dataset for your entire company and publish it internally as a fuckyou to whoever disclosed it, or is it a b2b thing?


When I looked mine up I could see just about every job I’ve ever had. It also showed who pulled this report over the past 24 months. I see that my credit card companies pulled it, a background check company that my current job used, and also some random “TEST Batch Account” whatever that is.

SSN + DOB and you can find out how much money I made on my w2 for many years of my life. Nice.

I am debating on doing a ccpa delete on this data. I wonder if future employers will give me a hard time when negotiating pay if they can’t verify my salary this way? Also, will I have to delete it every time that an employer sends them this data? Awesome.


I noticed that TEST Batch account and got a little concerned. Credit Karma is also polling my data monthly it seems. I don't like this one bit.


Did something change recently or did someone just notice this? Verification of employment/income is standard practice in many finance-related fields, and is required to get a mortgage in the US, for example. My company integrates with TheWorkNumber to provide that feature through our app. I can see why people are sketched out by not knowing this was happening, but as someone else said your pay rate is not _really_ private info. I care less about this than I do the credit agencies that have a full record of all of your credit activity, despite definitely not wanting them to have that info.


It looks like creditkarma loves, loves, loves to check this data. Except for the bank holding my mortgage only credit karma has checked it. I'm OK with the bank checking, if this system exists clearly bank handing out 1 million should be allowed to access it (my preferred outcome would be the system did not exist, or if it did be run by the government who already have all the data.


It's not just you -- CreditKarma checked my credit monthly for a long time in 2019-2020, until I changed addresses. I have never used a CK product. Obviously it's too late now to do anything about it but the existence of this site and the fact that Equifax is still in business makes me incredibly irritated.


A lot of consumer banking products have CreditKarma integration by default as a perk or for your "convenience". Digging through one of my checking account's apps shows that there are credit score previews with a button to activate CreditKarma and receive detailed credit breakdowns. I'm guessing that credit preview is provided by CK and not my bank, given the CK branding.


"To log in, enter your SSN, date of birth, home address, and" <closes tab>

No way, no how.


Regardless on if you enter it in this web form, Equifax has already lost your SSN in a data breach.


I dutifully entered everything they asked for, because, you know, they're Equifax and they undoubtedly have it already. Then they said I needed a "verification code" and gave me the option of half a dozen phone numbers and email addresses to choose from... none of which remotely resembled anything I've ever had (the email addresses all contained my surname and appeared to be randomly generated).

When I clicked the "none of these work for me" link at the bottom, I was presented with:

"Sorry, We are unable to log you in.

Your account is temporarily disabled. Accounts may be disabled when you attempt to log in with incorrect information or fail to complete a security challenge."


Same here. Great. I wonder what other lies they believe about me.

On the one hand, I'm probably glad the data is shit? But on the other hand, folks consuming the data might not understand that.


Was the email they offered to send the code to f**k@corpdomain.com? I tried this with my current and former employer and got seemingly the same email username "f**k", and seemingly random phone numbers. Another long-time employer had no email at all. Definitely seems they're just making things up.


we ought to be able to "correct" our own data and mislead anything seeking an advantage


This happened to me as well. bunch of random @yahoo addresses (I don't have one of those) and rando phone numbers, none of which were mine. Welp.... who knows wtf they have in there then, I guess.


Could this indicate past attempts by fraudsters to adopt your identity?


More likely to be a fake match so that people can't check whether records are in their database.


For me, the domain at the end of the email it wanted to send a verification code to seemed to belong to my company.


You entered data in a pop-up frame - how are you confident it is Equifax that you were providing your SS and birthday ?


Same problem here, really shows how good their security and data gathering is.


Also me with this issue.


They already have that info.

In fact, they already hired a music major CISO who leaked all that data in a stunning display of executive incompetence.


None of that information should be considered private any longer, if it ever really was.


Well, Equifax still considers it sufficient to claim your identity...


When?


It's amazing, but they did:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/equifax-ceo-hired-a-music-...


That alone really doesn't mean much. Security has even more than other areas of IT many people with "odd" backgrounds.


Yea, but it's Equifax, so they don't get the benefit of the doubt.


Yes, Equifax's ciso was clearly super competent.


I in no way suggested that, please don't pretend I did. We have plenty reason to assume she wasn't.


Then I'm not sure what the point of your post was.

Software security is a mess in large part because of the phenomenon you describe.


> Then I'm not sure what the point of your post was.

That "but she has a music degree!" is the least relevant part of evaluating if someone is qualified for such a CISO role or not. Someone with the "wrong" degree but talent and relevant experience would easily beat someone with a fancy "Masters of Information Security" degree that then muddled around in less relevant areas. Focusing on people's degrees is almost always the wrong measure in IT.


> Someone with the "wrong" degree but talent and relevant experience would easily beat someone with a fancy "Masters of Information Security" degree that then muddled around in less relevant areas.

Sure, totally agreed.

> Focusing on people's degrees is almost always the wrong measure in IT.

Maybe 20 years ago. (I was there.)

Today, asking for exceptional technical depth and a proven track-record of leadership is not a big ask.


And the linked article and the common references to it highlight almost exclusively "wrong degree/education" instead of "no relevant experience/track-record" (if that's the case, no clue what her experience looked like on paper. but the article also brushes it away with a sentence just to focus back on education). That's my problem with it.


I'm guessing you are from non-traditional background and work in it somehow. Having a track record is pretty basic when evaluating people for high level positions who have non-traditional backgrounds. Why is this upsetting to you?


> I'm guessing you are from non-traditional background and work in it somehow

You're guessing wrong.

> Having a track record is pretty basic when evaluating people for high level positions who have non-traditional backgrounds.

Not sure why you're saying that in a thread where everybody agrees that track record is important?

> Why is this upsetting to you?

It's not upsetting, I just think, as I've explained multiple times, that putting a spotlight on the degree alone, as the linked article does, is a bad argument, given that track record and experience matter much more than what degree someone got years ago. It's a cheap gotcha.


>> Why is this upsetting to you?

> It's not upsetting

You know what's truly upsetting? Pervasive gross incompetence in the C suites of American companies.

> I just think, as I've explained multiple times, that putting a spotlight on the degree alone, as the linked article does, is a bad argument

Why?

It would be a fucking scandal in literally any other field.

"Chief Medical Officer didn't have any medical training".

"Chief Accounting Officer doesn't have any accounting training and isn't a CPA."

Do you not respect IT as a profession? Or do you think anyone who has read some WebMD, shadowed a bit, and muddled through a few years of physical exams at a family practice should qualify for a CMO position?

> ...given that track record and experience matter much more than what degree someone got years ago. It's a cheap gotcha.

No, it isn't. Insisting on a formal demonstration of knowledge -- in addition to experience -- is not unreasonable.

The IT status quo doesn't exist in any other profession.

Engineers must attend ABET-accredited programs and then become or work under PEs.

Certification and required education is pervasive in medicine.

Lawyers attend law school pass the bar.

CPAs and actuaries take difficult exams.

Fact: IT security is a complete cluster fuck. Incompetence is everywhere. For every competent self-taught person there are dozens of dunning-kruger idiots. The status quo does not work. At all.

There are many jobs in software shouldn't require formal certification of technical knowledge. Just like there are many jobs in medicine, law, accounting, and finance that do not require formal certifications.

CISO of a credit bureau isn't one of those jobs.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach


She and her co-workers did fuck up badly and were unlucky enough to be under attack from one of the most powerful countries in the world. But to attribute that failure to her having received masters in composing fourteen years before, years she spent as a successful (as far as we know) Security Officer and VP at other financials seems a bit much like scapegoating.


Might as well do it so you can freeze it, they already have the info


Can a prospective employee use this data to gain an advantage in salary negotiations? If not, then this doesn’t seem fair at all.


No, Equifax does not share companies' payroll data with job applicants or employees. Only companies have access to salary and employment data.


Why on earth would employers be motivated to sell this data or provide consent to their payroll processors to disclose it?

What's in it for them? I can't imagine the per-employee revenue it brings in would be anywhere near the same magnitude of order as the FTE cost. So it's a drop in the bucket to their bottom line.

Meanwhile the reputational risk and PR blowback once found out could be severe (I certainly would never work for such a shady or ignorant outfit).


Lots of companies give the information away in return for reliable information about market salary rates. I'm not sure why they'd need to provide such detailed information, and why they'd give it to Equifax.


It saves HR a lot of time when their employees need employment verification for loans, apartment leases, etc.


Wow, this is completely accurate. Has temp working job on college campus, information from when I was at Microsoft and Google. Interesting from Microsoft it just contains my base salary and cash bonus, but Google has base salary, cash bonus, and RSU grants as "Other Income".


I have a distaste for the credit reporting system because of (a) the flagrant security lapses and (b) I still don’t understand why “identity theft” is somehow my problem when I am neither the fraudster nor the defrauded party.

What’s the strongest argument in favor of credit reporting agencies? If we got rid of them would borrowing money become so difficult or expensive that we’d regret what we wished for?


Someone told me they are illegal in many countries and that they are mainly a us/uk thing (may have been a European centric view).. not sure how accurate that is.

Edit: seems lots of places have them but they differ a bit, some only showing missed payments:

https://www.businessinsider.in/slideshows/miscellaneous/many...


The details of how it works and what exactly is legal differ country to country, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are countries where they are not really a thing, but they are not just a US/UK thing. (e.g. here in Germany many landlords will have you submit a score document from the primary credit rating agency with your application for a flat)


> What’s the strongest argument in favor of credit reporting agencies? If we got rid of them would borrowing money become so difficult or expensive that we’d regret what we wished for?

Before Credit Ratings Agencies, most people just couldn't get credit. They could bring a letter from their pastor to the bank and hope for the best. There was also a lot of racial bias in the process: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/rjn7uf/...

> According to my way older relatives, as in from the 1920s to the 1960s, most people didn't have access to credit. My family comes from the midwest. Poor and middle class white people at least...paid cash for almost everything. If you made enough money and seemed clean enough and had a letter from your pastor you could get a mortgage with 10-15 year term on it. Most of my family that lived in the cities back then were in their 30s-40s when they got their first homes, and lived among people just like them. Banks would not give them enough money to buy a house in the rich neighborhoods, only the middle class union people neighborhoods for white people.

> The ones who lived on the farms? Someone somewhere up the family tree paid cash after working on someone else's farm for awhile and bought their own land, and passed it down, and there was no credit involved. If they needed credit for things they could get on the ledger at the local general store. That was about it.

> People who were not rich did not have credit like people do now. They paid cash for everything. Banks would not lend money to poor or middle class people except for houses, and you had to have like 30% down and the terms were, as mentioned, 10-15 years tops.

> My Boomer parents have told me over and over again, that until the 1990s people didn't use credit like they do now. You just didn't. If you could not afford to pay for something you did without. My parents first car loan, which they only got when my dad re-enlisted in the military, had like an 18% interest rate and my parents had to put 20% down. My dad had to show his papers from the military and his paystubs from the military. And several dealerships turned them down. This was the early 1980s.

Apparently other countries do fine without it, though.


What the fudge. It has the health plan info for me, my wife, and my daughter on the report? This is not okay.


I kinda thought all 3 of my offers during my recent job change were suspiciously close. Now I know why, as all 3 employers requested it. Fuck everything about this.

A few jobs are missing, but the most recent (and therefore most relevant) is correct.


Learning that this website exists, and then finding detailed and accurate information in my record is what convinced me to start sharing my salary data with my peers.

As I see it, this database is a breach of an implicit social contract between me and the companies that I work for. Since my employers apparently have no issues sharing my salary with their peers, I see no reason not to do the same with my peers.


This kind of belies every company's excuse for not having comp transparency - that it's proprietary information they don't want competitors to know. Not only do they share these details on specific employees, they also provide percentile data to HR consultancies that use that to help set salary bands. Ever wonder when a company says they pay X% of market? They know that because everyone is sharing this info and they're doing it too.


No, it doesn't. Because comp transparency is within a company. And this is outside a company. Think about the venn diagram of participants.


You're right, I wasn't clear in my parent post and have edited it. Basically the standard lime I've heard is that this is some kind of competitive trade secret / proprietary secret formula that they don't want other companies finding out. No one has once said "we'll tell everyone but our employees in order to keep labor costs down".


So.... how much do you make?


$200/hr as a full time ML consultant.

Contracting is interesting. You make more, but there’s more downside. No sick days.

Though the last 3 month contract was kind enough to calculate the start and end dates to be exactly 12 work weeks (60 work days, skipping holidays) which was a nice Jedi mind trick. I still don’t get paid for Christmas, but somehow it doesn’t feel like I’m losing a day since the end date was extended by a day to compensate. But of course that only makes sense if you don’t think too carefully about it. :)

I dunno. It’s stressful but I like the freedom. But you live with a sword over your head; salaried employees don’t.

Plus now my salary isn’t in a database somewhere since it’s not salary. blows raspberry


Out of interest what’s your cv look like for that rate?


https://battle.shawwn.com/Shawn%20Presser's%20Resume.pdf

If it looks surprisingly dull, I hope it inspires you to realize you can get similar rates. I’m not particularly special; just determined, and willing to say no to low offers. (The initial offer was salary equal to half this rate plus stock. Being completely uninterested in stock is a tricky thing — you can offend your colleagues unless you’re especially tactful.)

My cv hasn’t been updated since 2016, but it’s also the exact cv I used at this company. That should indicate how much cvs matter relative to forming personal connections with founders.

The technique in this case was to ask an ML engineer on the JAX team what a hypothetical total comp package would be for this type of work at google. They said “making up numbers, but ~$400k.” So I refused any offers lower than that by pointing out that I could make this at Google rather than a high stress startup for half the pay plus stock.

I hope some of that is useful to anyone.


If you don't mind sharing more:

1. What kind of companies do you consult with? Is it startups, enterprises, mid-size companies? I see you mentioned forming connections with founders so I presume you mostly work with early stage startups.

2. What kind of work do you do? Advisory? Hands-on engineering? Modeling? Architecture?

3. How do you find your clients?


Interesting! I assumed ML consulting would require a long academic record (not saying the work requires that, just that there’s probably a bias towards that). How did you go from information security to ML? I’m taking some night classes at a local uni in the bay on ML to pick some of it up and might consider making a move once I’ve finished with my current work


It's a great CV. Very focused on what matters. As you say the CV isn't the most important part, but it shows what you offer now and conveys your many years experience without the noise (e.g. details of what tools/frameworks you were using in 2010 - who cares!)


It’s what I’ve charged for consulting and I only have 3.5 years of experience since graduating college. I’m salaried now, though.

Salary is $200k/yr with 1% stake in the company (0.5% early exercised - nothing vested yet).


Edit: I’d be keen to know what sort of consulting you do? :)

Edit 2: removed my personal salary and share options because this account is public


Full stack web dev


I'd be in favor of salary sharing in this sub-thread:

$155k base $145k/year RSUs (2021); $175k RSUs (2022 est)

"Senior" SRE in SF 3.5 YEO, 3.5 years at current company


Nice, what's WLB looking like in your role? What industry IYDMMA?


WLB is pretty good, I basically never work more than 40 hrs per week. I could probably make 20-50% more if I changed companies, but I don't really want to give up WLB. And the industry is probably best categorized as ad tech.


If all employees share their salary information with each other, it becomes a headache for the employer. Each employee may quote the other person's salary demanding a raise.

This is the reason behind the "keep your data confidential" idea.


I don't disagree with this. My experience though is that a more common reason it is a headache for some managers if their reports are sharing salary information is that they don't know how to have a conversation with someone about their performance. In particular their less than great performance.

So employee B comes in and says, "Hey employee A makes 15% more than I do and we have the same job! I even have more experience!" And the manager rates employee A's performance above employee B's so the salary is "appropriate" considering their relative productivity.

The problem comes in when the manager can't have an honest conversation with B to tell them this, and instead in their review gives them lots of happy talk and makes some sorry excuse for the small raise (or no raise!) saying something like "It has been a tough year and even I didn't get the raise I had hoped for! I really went to bat for you but nothing I could do could move them on available compensation." When, in fact, that is a lie and the employee is just being gaslighted because the employee would be mad and upset if they told them the "truth."

A good manager tells their reports what is expected of them and how it is measured so that when review time comes they are both on the same page when it comes to their pay. It also helps with making actionable plans to improve.

Sadly, there are a LOT of crappy managers out there.


If society was a meritocracy this might be true, but I’ve seen plenty of engineers paid significantly more than peers that were far better than them. At the end of the day compensation is really about politics and not performance.


Exactly. There's a difference between an difficult and awkward conversation that goes "Sorry B, A is better than you at writing code", but that's different from "Sorry B, A is honestly a worse coder than you across the board, but they negotiated a bit better at the start, so we pay them more."


In the job market, it’s mostly a matter of labor supply. If you really need people, and they demand $[x], you pay it or you don’t get an employee.


This only works for the people with the awareness and confidence to know what they’re worth. Even selecting for that small subset of the population, it’s still sometimes difficult to ascertain what the optimal salary is in any given environment. The issue is, the labor supply and its cost is known by the employer, but is largely hidden to the laborer.


Yeah, this explains a lot of it. Lots of people think it's unfair that Jim or Pam makes more than they do, but noone ever is blunt with them that "you're making less because you're not as good as them". Even worse are where they've never been told "you're lucky you still even have a job because I was close to firing you for poor performance".

To be fair, there are also the interesting niche cases where someone is equally capable as Jim/Pam, but they're just not as good at selling themselves. Both cases usually more applicable to larger companies.


And, perhaps not surprisingly, I think that last example "Not good at selling themselves" is also bad management. While everyone loves flattery, managers who aren't comfortable being objective with comparing work productivity are bad managers. I cannot count the number of times I wished there was something like codeacademy.com for learning management skills.

One thing that impressed me about IBM, during my brief tenure there after the Blekko acquisition, was that they had a very deep catalog of online self paced training material for developing manager skills. I don't know how many people availed themselves of that resource but since that time I have really wished I could have pointed people who were struggling at some of the courses they had.


if youre one of the employees that found out youre being paid significantly less than your team how do you convince your manager to increase your pay? Knowing youre high performing


If there is a reason that they are perceived as higher performing, maybe you can figure out why. What you might think is important might be different from what your boss think is important as a complete package.

Also a lot of people get really defensive and go into denial mode. Or are really full of themselves. People have a really hard time getting the straight out evaluation, or get despondent, and your manager is trying to give the feedback to the capacity level you have shown.


That's not gaslighting. It's just lying.


Fair enough.

For context, and again I don't disagree here, I was using it in the sense of saying something that may be technically 'true' (didn't get the raise I hoped for) & (went to bat for you) but in context would give the opposite impression than the one you got.

Consider a company that has a 'mandatory fire the bottom 10%' and a manager who doesn't want to go through the effort to hire someone and so argues that they should be allowed to keep employee A even though they are their lowest rated employee (that would be 'going to bat for you') and it would easy to imagine the manager wasn't happy with their own raise, and "it's been a tough year" ? How? Tough to get stuff done with under performing employees or tough for the company?

So lying? Yes, all by omission. And of course some particularly bad managers just straight up make things up.


> This is the reason behind the "keep your data confidential" idea.

It's also illegal under the NLRA of 1935. Employees talking about working conditions, like compensation, is a legally protected act whether it's on employer time or not.


However, employers can forbid you from using their facilities or property to facilitate these conversations.


Even if you're on company time, using company facilities and company resources, you have the legally protected right to discuss working conditions with other workers. It doesn't matter if you're using the company's Exchange or Matrix server to do so or not.


I’m afraid you are mistaken. I hope you are not confidently spreading this false information to others as it could put their jobs at risk.

https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d4582ec1a7e


Thanks for the correction, I wasn't aware of this decision.


As freelancer I was bringing up the discussion with my peers at a company about the amount we were getting paid.

Recruitment kind of worked like the following: the company that we were all employed at just paid a fixed amount per freelance developer. And the developers all got contracted through a preferred supplier. For development jobs the amount per hour for a freelancer was capped at around 90 EUR. The preferred supplier wanted to get at least 10 EUR per hour, so this meant the maximum a dev could earn was around 80 EUR per hour.

However often other recruitment companies would place developers at the preferred supplier, so they wanted a share of the cut as well.

One dev had the preferred supplier and 2 recruitment companies between himself and the company we worked at, so he earned only 55 EUR an hour.

Once we realised that for the employer it didn't really matter how much people earned, as long as it was no more than the hourly rate the company was willing to pay, all of us increased our rates at the next term, at the cost of the middlemen of course.

However, the recruitment company that hired me told me I could get one final raise, but I was forbidden to discuss remuneration in the future with my peers at this company.


Not sharing you salary is only beneficial to your employer.

And yes, the ability for one person say “I am doing the same work as this other person, but am receiving 72c to the dollar” is exactly why employers don’t want you sharing.

They don’t want employees to know what their labour is worth.


If all employers share their salary information with each other, it becomes a headache for the employee. Each employer may quote the other employer's salary refusing a raise.

This is the reason behind the "put all the data in a database" idea.


Rare to hear such a direct, strong argument for a union on HN.


Is it not always like this?


Not sure if you lurked much before creating an account. This is not my first account - I've been here since 2014. HN took a strong left turn a couple years ago. Before that it leaned more tech, and before that more founder/entrepreneurial. If I had to guess, it comes from this change in user distribution as HN is a decent way to keep a pulse on tech and IC's simply have more labor concerns.

(this is a weakly held take. just spitballing)


I think a lot of tech workers thought they were an elite of irreplaceable specialists that would never experience power imbalance. That's how my peers were thinking (out loud) about 10 years ago in San Francisco, and loudly opposing the mere idea we needed unions.

They then started having kids, running into HR issues and all of a sudden everyone got a real harsh wake up call and understood what their real place in life is.

The kind of "told you so" that doesn't feel particularly satisfying.


It’s still pretty bad. The majority sometimes seems to have a very naive libertarian slant but as people get older they generally wake up from that fantasy as they get screwed over in various ways.


And this is bad for the employees how?


In countries where unions exist for everyone on the building, everyone knows what everyone else is earning.

Additionally, in most European countries we don't have a culture of hidding our salaries from each other.


There wasn't too much salary sharing when I worked in Germany, in fact, it was the usual "keep everyone in the dark" approach from HR.


If the company signs the yearly tarif agreement done between the government and unions, everyone knows what someone at Tarif XYZ is earning.

You don't need a public list from HR, and almost everyone will answer when asked "do you mind telling me...".

Surely there are people that will answer that they rather not, so far I haven't bumped in such people so far.


Netherlands too, and Belgium as well, AFAIK.


That's definitely not true in France.

Unions and CSEs try to give some transparency on salaries for a given position in a given company, but even then, it's not like knowing the salary of everyone.


It is already more than what apparently happens in US.


[flagged]


Another union FUD comment on HN.

When organizations freeze, they close doors, simple as that.

I bet there are more suicides tied to reckless organizations like the Wall Street finance sector than unionized European countries.


I'm not sure how these go together. No problem sharing to your peers regardless of what your employer shares.


It's implication logic.

Employer sharing your data means you shouldn't think twice about doing the same.

Employer not sharing your data does not necessarily imply you can't.


Many people have an ethical sense that if something is understood to not be done to them they will not do it to others.

It takes a while for people to learn that, with exceptions, companies have never heard of this rule. But it's understandable that people would still feel bad about doing stuff we've been taught all our lives isn't really a good way to be.

Sure, a company isn't your friend, but that doesn't make "betraying trust" in response a nice feeling.


Both my YC backed previous employers have reported me and checked up on me in there before hiring me. My current employer has not. I was able to increase TC just shy of 150k when I jumped my current employer.


I registered and asked for my "Employment Data Report".

Besides showing all my pay data for the past two years (pay period start, pay period end, pay date, hours, and pay for each pay period) as I expected, it also lists everyone who has "procured your data" in the past 24 months.

The inquiries were interesting. Four organizations inquired. One is entirely as I expected, one is expected but the timing is slightly odd, one is maybe expected except they made a lot more inquiries than I would have expected, and one I have no idea what the heck they are doing.

The entirely expected one is my bank. Last year I applied for a home equity line of credit and there is one inquire near the start of that, and one that looks like it was just before they approved the loan.

The expected but odd one is Capital One. I applied for a new credit card from them. The oddity is the inquiry was about a week after I had received and started using the new card. I'd have expected it to be before they approved the application.

The one that is maybe expected except for the number of inquiries is Credit Karma. There are 8 inquiries, about a month apart, from January 2020 through September 2020. The report only goes back to January 2020 so it seems likely they were also inquiring before that. So once a month up until around the time Intuit bought Credit Karma.

The one I have no idea at all about is from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services dba CMS. That's a federal government agency that runs Medicare and works with the states to run Medicaid. I'm not old enough for Medicare and not poor enough for Medicaid and have not applied for any services CMS deals with as far as I know. The inquiry was in October 2020, and I don't recall doing anything unusual related to health at all around then.


Used to work there as a software developer and was somewhat acquainted with the business model. If you're employed and your employer outsources HR functionality to payroll providers (e.g. PayChex, ADP, etc.), there are contractual agreements to provide it to EWS, whose business model is literally more payroll records = $$$ = stock prices go up.


Salary data should be public anyway. Let’s all share ours. I’m currently contracting for $95/hr. My most recent salary was $140k, my most recent contracts besides my current one were a flat rate $24k contract for up to 80 hours and a short term contract for $100/hr. (I obviously like my current contract quite a lot)


the issue really isn't that it shouldn't be public. The issue is this service allows your new company to request your history so they can see your past salary. So you lose 100% of your negotiating power if they know how much you made and you don't know their ceiling.


At the risk of sounding naive and unrealistic, one could say your negotiating power should be based on the value your abilities add to a company. If we'd all share our income, we might create a union type of construction from which we can deduce a fair price for our services.


At the risk of not sounding naive, we could form an actual union.


So let’s make all our comp public. Don’t let them have that negotiation advantage.


How are you earning only $140k annually with a rate of $95/hr? Is it part-time?


Those are two different jobs.


I can't access my own data.

Someone already signed up using my SSN.


Looks like the same thing happened to me, great!


It's a bit of a side tangent but we seriously need to level the playing field when it comes to compensation. levels.fyi has done a lot for tech but there are tons of fields out there that don't have a hope. Someone needs to build a Glassdoor with a monetization model that isn't dependent on the self-same companies paying to advertise or hide reviews, etc.

I recently got started on something for accountants[0] (fun for me because I got to leverage NocoDB[1]), and I'm considering putting together something for everyone (i.e. every industry -- from gardeners to lawyers). Everyone needs to have a levels.fyi or an uncompromised Glassdoor and I can't find one so far. Even just something like camelcamelcamel for similar positions at the same company would be interesting.

[0]: https://nomorepizzaparties.com/

[1]: https://nocodb.com


This site is also another attack on Google Voice and similar numbers. The sign up mysteriously failed when I provided my Google Voice with no explanation. Suddenly worked when I provided my T-Mobile number. I expect more unblockable spam soon.


I loath sites that 'block voip' category services; as if Google Voice hasn't been proven MORE SECURE than T-mobile already.


Websites aren’t blocking VOIP numbers for security reasons, they’re usually blocking them for spam/trust/abuse reasons.

It is easy for someone on the other side of the planet to get a US VOIP number. It’s much harder for them to get a T-Mobile number.


I strongly believe what they really want (even if they don't know they want this) is a National ID system, that includes at least weak crypto signatures as a proof someone is holding a piece of ID.

Though what I'd rather have is a portal run by the government to run ID verification requests through (so they're logged) that people can then authenticate to that site and sign off on approvals for.


their CDN is omicroncdn.net - cannot make this stuff up


I don't get culture issue, in many countries I lived in never met anyone that had any issue sharing salary data.

In fact, most of them openely discuss such matters.

Never got why in US it is so "pssst, keep it low" when discussing such matters.


This seems to be a tool aimed at employers, enabling them to compare and verify salary data of potential candidates. It adds to the information imbalance already present and doesn't seem to be empowering or helping employees unless they actively share their numbers - an option they always had.


> an option they always had

No, they didn't. Many contracts explicitly forbid it and not every employee has the knowledge, courage or frankly financial stability to go against their employer.


Is that really true? I can't believe an employer could forbid discussing salary. That seem's completely illegal to me.


Not sure why salary data needs to be so secret. I think it is important for potential employer to understand how much an employee is willing to work for . For one thing they not going to approach you with lower salary then they know about. This eliminates a set of employers who cannot afford you and save a lot of time for everybody. Employer will obviously offer as low as they can (what would you do yourself in this case) but if you are unhappy with the offer you just don’t accept. It looks a important however to understand your “market value” but this requires getting multiple offers.


If I remember correctly, Massachusetts has a law that says that potential employers are not permitted to ask candidates what their previous salary was. The intent of this law is to ensure that people who have been discriminated against in the past will not continue to be discriminated against by new employers who "copy" the treatment of previous employers.

(a) Can anyone confirm that I'm remembering this correctly?

(b) Is this behavior by Equifax not a violation of the Massachusetts law (at least as far as it concerns citizens of Massachusetts, and in the spirit if not in the letter of the law)?


That’s an excellent question. Several states ban asking for salary history, but this seems like an easy loophole.


Who is selling the salary data to equifax?


Companies "share" the data with Equifax in order to get some services, such as employee verification outsourced.

https://theworknumber.com/partner-with-us


At least ADP, it would appear


Just curious how you figured that? If my employer uses ADP, how can I verify that ADP is the one giving this data to Equifax?


My understanding is that employers provide this data in exchange for getting access to the database


I’m not sure that’s quite correct. My company doesn’t directly provide this information at all, for example: We use ADP to run payroll, and they’re the ones who have provided my data.

This is (I think) more intended as a replacement for the current process a, say, mortgage underwriter uses to verify employment: (1) send email to a company-wide email account (info@company.com, in our case…) saying “please verify person X is employed as a Y making $Z as soon as possible” (2) hope email is received, (3) hope email is from the borrowers actual employer.


Can't they just ask for a pay stub or a letter from the employer? That's how they do it in France ( a signed and stamped "certificate" from the employer you've worked there since X, last 3 pay stubs and last two year's last ones(which have a recap for the whole year) and it seems to work fine.


By the sounds of it, they're not selling it... they're paying for it. :O


QuickBooks


We are not, knowingly, providing this data to Equifax; but sure enough, there it is. I'm going to guess it's tied up within the mountain of agreements with our HRIS or payroll provider.


"confirm your identity by providing a phone number or email to receive a one-time passcode"

<slaps forehead>


At least in my case, the number/email they were willing to send a one-time passcode to were the ones I gave to my employer, not the ones I had entered earlier in the form.


In my case, the number was completely unrecognizable to me, and then I was subsequently locked out of the account...

So either the site is broken and leaking information, or someone has already laid claim to my access.


Don’t worry, just wait for the next outdated struts application to be pwned and it will all be public.


Extremely disingenuous comment, there's no public dump of the Equifax data breach - that information was not made public by whoever accessed it.

To be honest I'd strongly prefer salary information to be more public, it would help me out in my salary negotiations.


It’s own disingenuous if you’re dumb enough to take it seriously.


Equifax has to be the epitomy of the most illegal thing that isn't.

In Europe this company could not exist.


I was surprised for about half a minute. Then I remembered, if it's not explicitly illegal and there's money to be made, of course they're doing it.


They know every single paycheck amount and date, so it really looks like it comes from ADP.


ADP is the largest payroll processor in the US. So once they are onboard with the data pipeline process, everyone else will probably follow.


I work at a company that's been in talks with Equifax, Experian and a new player (Blend) to provide employment and income verification data. Selling employee data and then spinning it as anything other than a short-term money grab is one of my least favorite things about my current employer.

That said, those who are worried about Equifax should probably rather be more worried about Experian. In our experience Experian is a) bidding more aggressively and b) has worse security practices. On the other hand, the Equifax talks I've been involved in demonstrate some of the changes Equifax has made to reduce risk of leaking sensitive data.

Equifax won't store any PII in our case. We store the data and provide them with an index file that is both encrypted and only contains internal identifiers and a hashed SSN (shared RSA key). Even if an attacker got their hands on all 3 things (decryption key, file and shared RSA hash key), they'd still only be able to know which SSNs are in our data-set, and nothing about those people. Everything else goes through our API, so the flow goes something like:

1. Equifax checks their hash file to see if we have their ssn 2. If so, Equifax authenticates against our API using their client id and secret and then makes their request for the employment/income information.

There are different calls they can make based on how much data they actually need to fulfill whatever the request is (e.g. if you're trying to verify employment you don't need the income data).

This is in contrast to Experian, who as a first step wanted a plaintext flat file containing a full dump of employment and income information for the last 7 years of everybody in our system...


If you have privacy concerns, you can put fraud alerts and put a free credit freeze your credit reports

Equifax: https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/cred...

Experian: https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html

TransUnion: https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze

And also freeze a few other reports

NCTUE (utilities and telecom): https://www.nctue.com/consumers

ChexSystems (banking): https://www.chexsystems.com/web/chexsystems/consumerdebit/pa...

Innovis (another CRA): https://www.innovis.com/personal/securityFreeze

LexisNexus (apparently insurance companies pull from them): https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/freeze

Work Number: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze

You can delete information from Plaid: https://plaid.com/legal/data-protection-request-form/

And usually you can talk to your doctor’s office about putting a flag on your medical records so they have to call you before releasing them to a third party

You can also opt out of Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx sharing information (individual banks may vary). You can also ask banks about additional security for your bank account.

Visa: https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do

Mastercard: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/vision/corp-responsibility/c...

Amex: https://www.americanexpress.com/us/privacy-center/

I also suggest setting up an IRS pin: https://www.irs.gov/identity-theft-fraud-scams/get-an-identi...


I assume this would only work if you want to never get a loan or say a new credit card - or anything of the sort that relies on that history.

Heck - maybe wouldn't even work for renting?


Unfreezing is a relatively easy process. They'll send you a pin where you can do it online, or you can send them a letter. It'll take them about 7 to 10 days to unfreeze things


Just to add on: an online unfreeze is instant, and all of the major agencies also let you unfreeze for a specified date range (even down to 1 day, I think -- although I usually do 2 or 3 days to cover a second pull if something goes wrong with whatever I'm applying for).

As a side note, if you use the online instant unfreeze, note that at least one of them (I can't remember which) handles timezones extremely poorly, and if the "start" date of your unfreeze has passed in their home timezone, they'll reject the unfreeze with an extremely vague error. You can resubmit using "tomorrow's" date and it will work fine (and be unfrozen immediately).


Salary data is proprietary between an employee and employer. There needs to be a law prohibiting sharing if it with any other parties.


If you don't feel employers should be permitted to circumvent the laws that prohibit them from demanding your current/past salary information by performing an end run through a 3rd party, you should contact your representatives.

Resistbot (https://resist.bot) makes this very easy.


In Israel this is a common practice for many years now, the Zviran Pay & Benefits Data [1] is widely used by employers and is a somewhat hidden secret from employees

[1] https://zviran.co.il/en/salary-surveys/


Yep, all my salary from Stanford University and Apple were sent in, including RSUs.

Apple, the poster-child for user privacy. They even listed me as an “Associate,” when I was doing sensor design. Not surprised, given how management treated us.

I wonder if they do it for all reporting levels, like if they’ll send in a manager’s salary as well.


I got my report but the data was way off. Base salaries reported too high (~2x), bonuses in the ballpark (but wrong), and RSUs reported too low (~2x). There is a lot of detail in the report that gives a false impression that they have the exact figures but they certainly do not appear to in all cases.


You can't share your salary data with co-workers, but we will share it with all your prospective employers.


If you are a resident of WA or CA, your information is not on that platform. I tried to fill out the “do not sell my information” form and I got a page that said this option is not available in your state. I am assuming the obvious. Perhaps my judgment is clouded. Thank you for this information OP.


The use case I have seen for this is not salary negotiation - in fact, that is illegal in a non-zero number of states - but rather employment validation for home mortgages and marketing purposes.

Not saying it's better - but it's probably not being used the way it seems many pre-suppose here.


Just checked and Salesforce (my employer) is not listed. One less element of privacy given away


What's funny about this type of data is how outdated it can be. When I used to have CapitalOne (I think it was them) their app showed a more elaborate credit report which included job history and other things. My job listed was a job I haven't worked at for nearly a decade. I can't imagine how inacurate this is. On the other hand, the data in aggregate might be useful to determine what kinds of jobs people have in different regions or something to that effect. I certainly hope the data is not shared with full doxing information to people like Facebook, that is horrific to think Facebook has your credit score attached to your profile.


Salary data is pretty valuable.

Someone should make a site (like glass door) where existing employees post salary information and other non-nda breaking information, and people who want it pay them for it (with the site taking a cut)

Why are we giving it away for free anyway?


There is already the blind app and also levels.fyi


At the moment, the model is that we put our valuable data into a pool in return for access to the pool. We then get access to semi-aggregate data from the pool which may be profitable for us, and the platform makes money by selling access or ads.

The model I was proposing was more of a market where you can go and anonymously pay the worker next to you to know how much he is paid, where it would be difficult to just ask. i.e. higher resolution more identifying information than people were comfortable to give away for free, sweetened by getting a useful amount of money.


Anyone interested in building a software solution around data harvesting with data dignity can hit me up. I am working on a solution that focuses on users benefitting from this kind of transactions.

twitter: @jonas_kg gmail: jonaskgmoo


How much does it cost to get a list of everyone's salary at my company?


Right now? Probably not possible unless you are also sharing information on your own employees.

In 6 months after the inevitable breach? Free for everyone.


They asked for almost no information to get this data. If you just go find the data leak where everyone's name + SSN is - and then tie it to someone's current address then that's all you'll need.

Only things I noticed you needed to request info was: first + Last, SSN, DOB, current address


Maybe you can register a 1 person company and share your employee details for access to the platform.


Might as well pay yourself $3/min to increase accuracy in their database.


Just search on sharepoint, someone might have just left that lying around.


I wrote software for a company that sold software to Texas hhsc, they use this to look for hidden assets when assessing benefits. This is the only system I know of that contains salary info. We integrated with their apis for a number of products and their data is a mess and often not very accurate. Also their api has a decent error rate. 5 years ago anyway, their api would break with any non unicode characters in a name. There were some foreign companies that we couldn't get data from for example.


It's "nice" that this is the disclaimer above the footer of the search form page:

> The information provided here is an unofficial report, intended for personal use by the employee-recipient only. It is not intended for verification purposes. Using this document for consumer verification purposes could constitute a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. If someone is asking you to provide verification of employment or income, please direct them to www.theworknumber.com.

> NOT INTENDED FOR VERIFICATION PURPOSES.

mkay


what is the work number? is this deliberately a confusingly made up name of company and what they do?


Employers use it to offload employment verification to Equifax (who owns this product and offers automated employment verification based on the data). They also get aggregated salary data in return for providing personal employee compensation information.


It’s one of the most widely used background checking services. At least three of the companies I worked for will simply tell anyone doing the background check their worknumber ID so the background check service can just check on the site. I like the system because it’s a simple way to get your dates of employment reliably without anyone having to literally call up a HR person at a previous company.

But, what the fuck are they doing making this data available beyond that? This has to be illegal.


My first company out of college used it for when you needed employment verification for buying a house. Your bank could call the number and get all the info they needed.


Why wouldn't you just... call the company?


I assume because they wanted to outsource it and relieve HR. I'm not entirely sure but I'm sure offloading any compliance with that data is a benefit too.


I used it to verify my salary with my mortgage broker to get my loan.


In this day and age with phishing and other impersonation sites running rampant, I wish large corporations would leverage their root domain appropriately and use subdomains. Why isn't this theworknumber.equifax.com to provide legitimacy? Why can't I use my equifax login to check it? And why does it redirect to yet another domain: https://secure.theworknumber.talx.com?


It is a pretty bold offer considering how completely awful their data security turned out to be after their enormous data leak. How are they able to stay away from law suits?


I cant access the form with firefox. I dont see any blocked requests from my dns blocker in the network tab.

Uncaught DOMException: Permission denied to access property "frameElement" on cross-origin object EnterIDAndPIN.ascx:131 postDataToAuthApp https://secure.theworknumber.talx.com/twneeer/Preauthenticat...


I can't even log in because they want to text verification codes to phone numbers that have never been associated with me (maybe they're old work cell numbers?)


Same here. If I try other ways to validate it seems to offer email addresses for people at the company (I'm guessing HR).


Did we hug it to death already? I am getting a server error.


Not hug. Kick. Hard. Repeatedly. While down.


Where is Anonymous when we need them?


Hopefully sitting on a jury in any of a half dozen states.


I feel like this could be good for some people and very bad for others. Good luck getting a 50% increase with a new job when your salary history is available.


I'm not going to touch this website because I don't want to learn in 6 months that I was actually agreeing to sell off my soul and house but...

The previous addresses thing makes me feel like this will get taken down very soon. Everyone knows that abusers and stalkers can make very dangerous use out of addresses. It's only going to take one terrible incident before this gets investigated by the government.


If they would operate in Europe, they would be fined tens and hundereds of millions USD in each country for publishing such private information...


Just checked it: Amazon and Facebook are both in here.


Actually for me Google and Facebook is there, but Amazon is not.


Interesting. When did you work at Amazon? For me it was summer 2013 to summer 2015.


Middle 2020 to middle 2021.


Hopefully that means they’ve stopped sharing this info since I was there


In Colorado, employers are not allowed to prevent people from discussing compensation with coworkers and they can't retaliate if they do.

I'm working for a DAO and our salaries are public because governance had to approve the budget and all the transactions are on the public blockchain. It's refreshing to that level of transparency not to mention it forces us to have fair compensation.


> In Colorado, employers are not allowed to prevent people from discussing compensation with coworkers and they can't retaliate if they do.

That's the case across the entire US. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 protects workers' rights to discuss working conditions, including compensation, on company time or off.


Did you know TWN charge ridiculous $$ to their clients for this data which they don’t even ask users the permission to share?

Oh just sharing my PII data such as SSN, DOB, how much I make, earnings, deductions, 401K, my previous sal, where I worked everything without my consent? I mean the f&$k!

Why are employers/ payroll providers sharing this data without users consent? It’s not theirs to share?


There was an article in the New York Times about three years ago that ADP sells everyone's salary information, too.

If your company uses ADP for payroll processing, your company has "agreed" on your behalf to make this information available for sale.

Unless you're in a company of three people, good luck getting the payroll department to move to a more ethical payroll provider.


Would you happen to have a link?


The real question is why should Equifax have my data in the first place. My contract is with my employer not with Equifax. This is a breach of trust by the employer using my information as its product for sale. What is the government role in regulating this ? If government can't regulate this, what is the point of government's existence ?


I don't think Equifax is really the one to be doing this but I do think this type of transparency is good. It will only serve to level the playing field and prevent employers from taking advantage. For that reason though, I don't see many employers sharing these data, especially any who would be on the lower end of the spectrum.


I wonder if most of the info is sent by the payroll / HR software employers use, rather than the employer themselves and without said employers knowledge? I.e. it’s a way for the payroll software companies to earn extra money rather than the original employer.


Just as a reminder, not sharing you salary information with peers only helps one group: employers.


Why does it redirect you to a talx address when you login? I mean I looked it up and it seems talx is appropriate. But these domain names not using equifax.com/redirecting to different domains is freaking stupid because it really smells like phishing


Honest question for people who are concerned about this - why is it troubling? If another company wants to hire you, obviously they'll need to offer stronger compensation than you currently have to convince you to ditch a comfortable position.

The fact that employers want employees to stay quiet about their compensation so they don't have to start handing out raises doesn't seem like a good reason to be concerned about this to me. From an employers perspective, that taboo makes sense to push - I'm not saying it's right, just that it makes sense from a business perspective. Quite frankly, we've all seen proof that some people are just much more proficient at certain tasks than others. Management could spend all day explaining to someone why that person gets paid way more than the next person, but the simple fact that they have been getting paid more for years speaks for itself in my opinion.


Imagine that your new employer knows your past salary. They can offer you 10% above it and this might be sufficient in enough cases. However, if they don't know it, they will be in the fog of war and they will have to guess much more and be ready for a wider salary range. In such scenarios the new offer might not be 10% but something like 30%. Now, imagine the accumulated effect over 2-3 employers over time.


I've had pretty good success being completely honest about my salary requirements. A 10% raise just won't cut for me, because I care about my team. The only way I'm willing to leave is for a <your_number_here>% raise, and comparable benefits.

Edit: I'm probably biased, because I've been shown a lot of love the past few years by my current employer, in the form of money.


Those were example numbers. The key part is the asimetric information: the new company knows your rock bottom, while you have no way to know their upper limit.


Yeah, I get it, and you're not wrong - you'll probably end up with a higher salary operating that way. It's just not for me. I've already reached my "good enough" salary (the hard way), and at this point I'm more focused on what I can give back.


You don't get it. It's not about you.

Statistically, with this setup, companies will constantly underpay. Yes, there will be some outliers being overpaid or those happy with their salary, but most will be in fact underpaid.


What don't I get exactly? I said "it's just not for me." I'm not sure how I can be much more clear that the sentiment was in fact about me.


We are talking about systemic problems here and you came in practically going ME, ME, ME.

See how that could be considered a little tone deaf? :-)


Fair point.


I still carry the trauma from a previous exployer1 and though I pretty like my current one, the relationship is regularly reevaluated.

1. this was an honest typo in the beginning, but reading it I decided that it is a right one.


a) Lots of people consider their salary quite private/personal. Equifax are, in the eyes of myself and many others, a pretty awful company, AND proven to be terrible at data security. Them hoovering up all sorts of private data that nobody wants them to have, and then selling it off, is gross

b) A potential new employer knowing your current/previous salary is bad for your negotiating position, not good


There have been stories about people who graduated in 2008 who had an awful time finding a job despite getting "useful" degrees because the economy was in shambles. Their salaries _x_ years out of school were notably lower than similar groups a bit older or younger. Many of them took any job they could get.

Now think about someone who got a job in their degree field, but at a 30% reduced salary than typical (because that's the only way a company could justify hiring someone). If each successive company knows the current salary of their future employee and offers 15% more to be compelling, the employee is still far behind an employee following the same path starting 2 years earlier/later. Add in the opaque nature of salary bands that are basically never widely disclosed to employees and a really rough narrative is formed for a group of people.


It's massive collusion by companies on a country wide scale.


> The fact that employers want employees to stay quiet about their compensation so they don't have to start handing out raises doesn't seem like a good reason to be concerned about this to me. From an employers perspective, that taboo makes sense to push

In the US, pushing that taboo can be illegal if employers prevent workers from engaging in legally protected acts, like discussing their compensation while at work, or if employers retaliate against workers for doing so. Congress enshrined those rights into law nearly a century ago, and the National Labor Relations Board exists to protect those rights for workers.


Imagine the scenario where software was made that took this leaked data and sent out personalized emails to every American telling them what their colleagues, boss, and boss’s boss made.

Wonder what this type of psychological software weapon would do politically…


Seems like a site we should all submit to https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/


Having hopped jobs every 1-2 years for the last decade, I don't think I've ever been honest when asked my current salary. Never bit me. It would be quite shocking (would it be legal?) if an offer was rescinded based on this data.


There's always answers like "I think $X would be fair, it's a little more than I'm making now", or "it's close to what I was making before", etc.


I wouldn't frame it like that because now you're bargaining over what percent Y you deserve over your old salary--they are always going to try to push that down. Frame it as, "an engineer with my skills in this market is worth $Y, let's close this deal now". Remember they have a budget for how much they can spend for a position and you're trying to put yourself into that bucket.


Sure but my philosophy is all companies are lying to me during "negotiations" so fair is fair. I guess you could say that means it's also fair for them to further cheat and buy my info ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Their hamburger offers an option “my personal data” but when I clicked on it I got a 403


Damn, my entire history is there, down to the cent... base pay, bonuses, everything. I can't even get this old data from my employer's intranet. Such BS.

Can anyone confirm prospective employers actually pull this before making an offer?


Seems to require a US phone number to sign up. I don't live in the US anymore.


More on this here:

https://www.fastcompany.com/40485634/equifax-salary-data-and...


I find it interesting that no employer of mine since 2011 has been reporting data to this.

Also the pages in the report are literally sideways, which made trying to read it on my phone nearly impossible.


Does this website or any other similar ones show your performance, your rehire-ability or if you got fired from a previous job? (outside of what can be inferred from your compensation)


Not exactly. It says active or terminated (we switched payroll providers) on my few.


Interesting, does terminated mean that you got fired or just that you generically don't work there anymore (which is used for both when you quit voluntarily and when you're fired)?


In HR speak, terminated just means no longer working for the company for any reason. In this case, it may be a quirk of how the payroll processor switch was handled.


I don't know how they're using that term. I've never been fired... yet.


>Who has accessed the report in the past 24 months

That is fucked up.

Edit - looking around, this system that has all of my personal data has a password requirement that looks like it was made in the 1990's.

8-16 characters. FFS


I was just thinking last night that in 2022 we are going to see a lot of pushback against rising salaries and employee bargaining power. I expect more of this crap around the globe


Such information asymmetry shifts market powers towards employers. As as I understand, an employee can't get a similar dataset of salary ranges in a particular company.


just the other day I got a prompt on my Amex (or Chase) account to update my salary info. i wouldn't be surprised if they sell this data to advertisers.


Equifax asking me to input my SSN to see this data... hmm.


Information asymmetry in salary negotiation involves an employer finding out what you earn and using that as leverage over what they will pay you


How is this not considered PII and subject to all of the disclosure and control requirements we all must abide by? May an employer opt out?


Can I pay to see my colleagues’ paychecks?


Stuff like this is why I am pro-union, even when I am not a socialist or whatever.

Employers have all the power over employees, they share data indiscriminately, they have all the information and power. It's only fair that employees have some power back and they can bargain together as a group.

(Ironically in "socialist" countries, the employer has more power, because the employer, the union and the state are all ultimately the same entity, as they are all controlled by the party. But that's a different discussion I guess.)


In Sweden salary information like this is provided by the government for everyone. Just a phone call away.


Jag är glad att jag lämnade Sverige.


This can be manipulated for profit


Does it work only for people that are currently employed? Or does it sell also past data?


Can't bother to register. Waiting for the inevitable leak to satisfy my curiosity


Does anyone else get a "Server Error" when trying to "register?"


This is positively dystopian.


Hilarious watching (tech-literate even) people lose their mind over this. While they use their iPad/Android to generate a million data points about intimate life details, conversations and locations on a daily basis - no problem! It's only an outrage when someone says it is.


Thankfully I wasn't able to find anything from employers in Canada


If this is correct, then it would be risky for someone to lie to a new employer about their former salary in order to receive an offer for a higher pay, because the new employer could use this service to cross check the employee's claims.


Why are you telling prospective employers your former salary? Just because someone asks, you don't have to answer.

You aren't some desperate person begging for work, you are helping them achieve their goals in exchange for payment. It is a trade.


I guess the answer now is "I'm sure you have that information already"


You don't need to lie. There's nothing wrong with saying "My current salary is $xxxxx, but I feel that my employer undervalues my skills so I want $yyyyyy. It's why I'm leaving my current role." There is no reason why your future salary has to be based on your current salary. If the employer you're negotiating with disagrees then walking away is the best option because they undervalue your skills too.


In practice future salaries are heavily based on current ones because that is what the new employer is de facto negotiating against. Very few people, in my experience, are willing to entertain a new job with a salary much lower than their last one. And very few employers are willing to 'leave money on the table' and offer more than they think they need to close the candidate simply because the candidate thinks they have 'mad skillz'.

If you want to actually get paid more, get two competing offers. Or you can try the strategy of not lying and just telling the new employer, 'I'm not going to tell you my previous salary.' The downside is that this clearly signals to the employer that you weren't making very much before and you are fishing for a big raise.

This kind of goes against conventional wisdom, but I actually don't think that switching jobs is the strongest time to ask for more money. I think it's after you have gotten into a role, are killing it, and adding crazy value to the company. That's when you actually have a lot of leverage to say 'hey, I love what I'm doing here and I should be paid a lot more'.


> This kind of goes against conventional wisdom, but I actually don't think that switching jobs is the strongest time to ask for more money. I think it's after you have gotten into a role, are killing it, and adding crazy value to the company. That's when you actually have a lot of leverage to say 'hey, I love what I'm doing here and I should be paid a lot more'.

Out of curiosity, has that worked for you? My previous employer only gave me a significant raise after I threatened to quit (with an offer waiting at another company). I ended up doing it a few times. Eventually I got tired of constantly interviewing and threatening to quit and did a sideways move to a YC backed company. Total comp is about the same, maybe slightly lower, but maybe the stocks will pay out some day :D. Being fully remote is a nice perk though.


Yes, it's both worked for me and I've also managed many, many people in orgs who have proven very valuable to the company and had their comp doubled or more. Most people are not bold enough in negotiation for their own good once they are entrenched at a company. You need to create a relationship with the person who can make such a thing happen. If it's not your direct boss, then find the person up the food chain who can make such a thing happen.


The downside is that this clearly signals to the employer that you weren't making very much before and you are fishing for a big raise.

Calling it "fishing for a big raise" sounds like you're trying to scam a higher salary out of an employer. That just isn't true. There's no reason to think you're worth less just because your previous employer sucked.

Salary negotiation is about finding an amount that the employer and employee agree a job is worth. Any previous salary has no impact on that.


Yes, it's a negotiation and the negotiation is bounded on one side by 'what the job/employee is worth to the employer' and the other side by 'what the employee is willing to accept.' My point is that your previous salary strongly dictates the latter and thus heavily affects the negotiation.

And if you don't like the 'fishing for a raise' terminology we can instead just say that it signals that you don't think your previous salary is a strong point in your negotiation. So now the prospective employer doesn't know your salary, but suspects that the negotiation window is quite wide.


The last part doesn't work in almost any company where you're not directly working with the owner.

Middle managers can't approve any raise higher than say, 5%, and even that's after a full review cycle.

It's a lot more likely to put a bullseye on your head as "money driven" or something considered negative (yes, the irony is jarring!).


If they tell you this there is a 99% chance is it BS. As someone elsewhere in the thread points out, it's just a manager not wanting to have an unpleasant conversation and saying 'hey, it's out of my hands' with the assumption that the junior employe won't know any better.

If you are truly in a company that far gone with process then all is lost (and top talent will just leave anyways.) Or you are a lawyer :)


I'm not a junior and I don't know anyone who got a raise higher than 5% or so without a resignation letter in their hand.

In my experience this can only happen at small companies. The bigger the company the more they'll wish you good luck in future endeavors if you insist.


Middle managers can't approve any raise higher than say, 5%, and even that's after a full review cycle.

They can ask their boss to approve it though, and if necessary it could go all the way to the top.


Most people wouldn't stick their neck out unless it's really necessary and directly beneficial, especially since there are systems in place to prevent/block/slow down this kind of thing. Especially if you're a newcomer.

The positive case is the (very rare) exception.


Then they will just offer something in the middle and try to talk you into it.

That being said, at least for the big companies the initial salary is not that important. In some ways you are just setting yourself up for disappointment since if you start at the top of the band there will be no significant raises without a promotion.

For RSUs it has a pretty significant effect for 4 years though.


Then they will just offer something in the middle and try to talk you into it.

You can always say no.

In some ways you are just setting yourself up for disappointment since if you start at the top of the band there will be no significant raises without a promotion.

It sounds like you're saying starting at 80% of the band so you can enjoy a 25% raise to get to the top is better than just starting at the top. That doesn't make sense though.


Sure, of course it is in some was better to start at 100%.

The problem is that we all still expect to get a raise, and that cannot happen at a big company if it would take you out of band. I don't think there are many exceptions to this. If they really like you they might throw some RSUs at you, but very likely will not go over the salary for that band.

So unless you think you can get promoted right away (which requires significant luck as well), I think for long term happiness it is actually better to get salary on 80% and negotiate more on the initial RSU grant.


I'm finding out just in the past two years that the days when you could count on Corp. Entity A in Tallahassee not knowing about a prior transaction with Corp. Entity B in Portland, are pretty much over. Everybody knows everything. Even knowing this, seeing the amount of per-pay-period to-the-penny detail, going back to 1998, that's in this Equifax report, was a little surreal.


Wouldn't this just lead to lower offers all around?


This makes sense from an employer's POV. It's a B2B co., this is how they appeal to their clients.


That's precisely the value proposition for employers.


How can anyone say it’s accurate?


Employers provide it. Obviously they could report incorrectly, but it's not like Equifax is just guessing.


Would you be willing to torpedo a good candidate making a reasonable request for compensation based on a discrepancy on this site?


Would I personally? No. But then I would not ask the requisite question of "what was your prior salary" in the first place.

Fact of the matter is that this tool makes it trivial for medium and large employers to suppress wages.


And if you were, I suspect you are doing the candidate a favor.


a favor? how so


You could start your own co. and raise your salary to the sky, this can be gamed. But then, why would you even be an employee.

However, for the average worker, this is awful


Wouldn't you still need to be a paying Equifax customer to supply that?


Say you were to increase your salary to 500k/y, you work in a lucrative industry for example, I think Equifax charges less than 5k upfront for whatever suite of services they're offering, and if I understood correctly, to gain entry into the service, you simply have to add data into the database.

There's a way to break Equifax, but they're expecting people not to have the balls/time to do it, and I think they're right. You can't expect your average mom of two that works at Walmart to figure this stuff out, it's a tilted playing field.


Silver lining is that I don't see any RSU compensation listed in my report! That's the biggest chunk of my earnings anyway, so that should be fair game during negotiations.


[flagged]


Please don't post this sort of shallow attack. If you have a substantive criticism to make, that's of course fine, but please make it respectfully.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


At what point did I as a US Citizen opt-in to this sick system?


When you applied for money from someone else, either as credit or in exchange for labor.


Are there any downsides to requesting this data on yourself?


None that I can see.


What can we do to stop privacy invasions like this?


I have no clue. Spread awareness and contact your senator?


Does anyone know what’s the code for Apple?


Any way to log in if currently unemployed?


Anyone know if there is a UK equivalent?


What an amazing world we live in.


Is this just for United States?


It doesn't appear to work for Australian employers, so it does not seem to cover every country, and I would guess it is mostly north american?

Do other countries have similarly scummy services? Is there one for Australia? My gut says "yes". What should we google to find similar things in our locale?


Cue outrage from tons of hypocrites who complain about the GDPR making it harder for companies to use personal information


It’s doubtful it comes from your employer, it more likely comes from credit applications.


I requested my report using the link in the OP. The only place Equifax could have gotten this information, with this granularity, is my employer. It's not just a ballpark number or anything like that; it's detailed salary information for the last 10 years, broken down by category (salary, bonus, equity). For the past year, they have granular information for each pay period, including both gross and net.


It definitely comes from the employer, it has per paycheck info.


My report contains PER PAY PERIOD line items from ~50% of my previous employers.

I can even see where I changed my 401K withholding at one point in time.


Is this for the US only?


Is there any equivalent to this in Europe? Would it not be illegal under GDPR?


Gf


Yes, it's concerning, but let's be realistic about this. I'm surprised HN readers are so surprised by this! On a scale of Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) to carriers divulging location when you enter somebody's phone number (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684), I'd say this is 2/10 bad. This really has nothing to do with employers colluding and trying to keep salaries low. Instead, it's just a way for businesses to verify your salary, given they have your SSN, DoB, and address.

First, it requires your SSN, date of birth, and home address. That a) means that prospective employers aren't able to view it (since you're not divulging your SSN in order to get an offer letter), and b) given these three pieces of information, requesting your salary is probably one of the least malicious things somebody could do. They could steal your identity, open up credit cards (some credit cards allow you to now get a virtual CC number before the card is shipped and confirmed), open up phone lines, SIM jack you, etc. Getting your salary data (given you have somebody's SSN, DoB, and home address) is likely one of the lowest things on the list.

Second, salary data is fairly public anyways. For example, if your company is of any reasonable size, they probably employ people on the H1B visa. Salary data is public already. Here, for example, is Airbnb's salary data: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Airbnb&job=&city=&year=202....

Third, there are legitimate reasons why this system exists. If you're applying for a mortgage, how do you expect them to verify your salary? You can submit paystubs, but those can be faked. Same with bank statements. The only way for a bank to verify your salary is to actually call your employer. And if a bank calls your employer to verify your salary, and they have your DoB, SSN, and home address, it's pretty likely your employer is going to tell them anyways. Even if your employer only confirmed / denied (as opposed to providing a number), they could just repeatedly call and binary search it. (This probably wouldn't surprise the employer, since you might be getting quotes from multiple mortgage companies at once.) Given that mortgage companies, banks, and other finserv firms need to verify your income and employment history, it's not entirely unreasonable for a centralized database to exist, and for it to be guarded by what should be secret (SSN, DoB, address).

That said, the problem is that the US is too reliant on SSNs. If you prior on (the US treats SSNs as secret), being able to access salary data with it really isn't ridiculous.


> there are legitimate reasons why this system exists.

Not really.

> If you're applying for a mortgage, how do you expect them to verify your salary? You can submit paystubs, but those can be faked. Same with bank statements.

Faking paystubs and bank statements is called "fraud" and most people are pretty reluctant to commit it.

> And if a bank calls your employer to verify your salary, and they have your DoB, SSN, and home address, it's pretty likely your employer is going to tell them anyways.

I find that hard to believe. The person who answers the phones for payroll would be worried about disclosing too much and getting fired, and legal constantly tells managers to keep their mouths shut to avoid saying something that could get them sued


Also there a way less invasive ways of certifying your salary to banks. All places I have worked in the US I could automatically print a letter saying something like "we certify XXX works here with a base salary of YYY".


Bingo. Your employer will work with you when you need help getting a mortgage. Not some random person who calls and says they work for a mortgage company


> If you're applying for a mortgage, how do you expect them to verify your salary? You can submit paystubs, but those can be faked.

Why not keep this, and punish people who submit fake paystubs for committing fraud? I could also take advantage of my employer by faking other documents and signatures, but I (and most people out there) don't do that because that's illegal. If your potential employees are so untrustworthy that you can't trust them not to defraud you, you have bigger issues as a company anyways.


While salary data is available on h1bdata.info - I never found it showing RSUs or any equity of the like. Whereas this clearly shows how much I am getting from RSUs. It didn't show any equity stake but - holy crap - it was disturbing that my RSUs showed up so obviously. Very easy to figure out how much I was awarded.


Do you have access to the employer side? It's not obvious what they need besides money to view your data.


asdfalskdfjlakjsdf


"I can't believe you could ever do this to me, Employer! You - you said we were like Family! I mean, it seems just the other day you, me and the CFO were tipping cheap IPAs and bonding at the foosball table ..."


[flagged]


Taking HN threads into nationalistic and/or ideological flamewar like this is against HN's rules and we ban accounts that do it. Please don't do it again.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.


I understand thanks, this article bit me the wrong way. I rarely post things like this.


I am neither American nor Chinese, nor live in either country. Their governments both do awful things around the world as well as domestically, but here’s one reason I’d rather live in the former: you can publicly criticize the government, and organise an opposition to it.


You can also talk more publicly about any topic pretty much - being "cancelled" in the US is laughable compared to the Chinese version of cancelled (i.e. deleted from the Internet, publicly humiliated and/or possibly disappeared for weeks on end for even a mild suggestion that the financial system is not optimal in China, something reasonably up for discussion).


Why don't you try searching "tiananmen square" in China and see where that gets you? No country is perfect, the US certainly isn't, but I would still take this over China's social scoring system


I believe that the outcome of searching "tiananmen square" in China is a page of poor quality results and possibly slow internet for some time, but no meaningful consequences beyond that.


You can pick up your baggages and move to one those countries since they are the same or better as you say, but it must be China, Russia, Cuba or equivalent; none of west or northern Europe. That kind of comments show that you have never lived in a dictatorship.


Clearly, you haven't lived under a authoritarian government. I have, and I live in US now. I don't have to think more than one second which one I would prefer between US and China. And I am aware US is plagued with every kind of problem at every level.


Your profile says "I'm not here for politics".


This should be a welcomed critique. While I believe China is worse, the US has many issues that affect the majority on a personal level that should bother the average citizen more than it does. Healthcare insurance, medical debt, credit scores, worker’s rights, privacy data, and the list goes on.

I could whataboutism your point, but I think it’s clear you aren’t saying we should move to China. Instead the point seems to be that our Democracy seems to be back sliding.

Plus critiquing your government makes for a better democracy.


Thank you, as you’re the only one who gets it.


[flagged]


Explain


Mark Begor is the CEO of Equifax since April 2018. The Equifax data breach occurred between May and July 2017.


You're right


The information for my limited company earnings is also available online as part of the company accounts and you can probably work out my day rate from it.

Not sure I care that much. Also, I don't think someone who thinks they deserve a big bump and has passed the interview I wouldn't necessarily say it's the most immoral crime to suggest your previous salary was higher than it really was. Surely you have a job that is paying X and the person can either do the job well or not.

Why should I be worried about others knowing what I earn?


This is a good use case for the web3 ecosystem, or at least for those working on the decentralization, personal data ownership and control parts.

It should be obvious that it is important to employers to be able to verify the claims made by people who are applying to them for jobs. Claims of employment or education or credential or skill or whatever. That's what zero trust is all about, isn't it?

That need is the reason that this data is (centrally) collected and then shared. There is a massive mutual benefit incentive on the part of employers- and on the part of the SAAS providers to employers- to share data on the employees and to benefit from data of others being shared.

And yes that may be seen to violate the privacy of the people who had an employment relationship and who received money over the course of that relationship, but employer corporate persons are at least part owners of that data- of what money and what dates and so forth was paid to what human persons by them.

By what means does a web3 protocol based on verifiable credentials enable those who have requirements to perform verification while preventing centralization and preserving the rights of the humans whose data participates in these protocols?

That's the mountaintop goal. What's the path to get there?


There's no need to involve 'web3' (whatever that even means) in this.

Simple crypto is all you'd need to produce a verifiable employment record; each company has a key and signs a document conveying whatever information you want (x person employed for y years etc).


Indeed there is.

This is a mechanism design problem- a behavioral protocol problem- not a technology one. That's what web3 is about.

And downvoting my question is ridiculous.


I don't have the ability to downvote, it's locked behind reputation (not sure of the exact amount).

Show me the problem with an alternative solution, don't preach about supposed benefits.


>I don't have the ability to downvote, it's locked behind reputation (not sure of the exact amount).

Looks like 501 karma required.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23503852


I think it would depend a lot on who has the power in said product. The business model of the product.

If it's tailored towards workers, it could be as simple as a key that you, the employee, could revoke at any time, making the centralized data void. Something like rainbow.me

For the b2b model... well it could be like equifax I guess? Offer to provide that service to the business to check the data, while allowing the user to revoke it at any time, for a small fee paid in the crypto of your choice perhaps paid by the business for accessing the data.


2030 and Equifax “uses the latest blockchain data” in their composite score sold to HR customers. A blockchain-based system doesn’t have enough centralized database control to appeal to Equifax.




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