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Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

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Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#481

Post by bradlys »

astura wrote: post #470
spiznnx wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

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.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#482

Post by bradlys »

sincerely wrote: post #316
bradlys wrote: post #55

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 informa…

"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.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#483

Post by [deleted] »

Pixeleen wrote: post #299
staunch wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#484

Post by bigfudge »

drorco wrote: post #450
kodemager wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#485

Post by tomnipotent »

ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #461
staunch wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 prob…

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

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#486

Post by Traster »

BeefySwain wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#488

Post by bigbizisverywyz »

tomnipotent wrote: post #485
ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

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

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.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#489

Post by pjmlp »

Arkanosis wrote: post #468
pjmlp wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#490

Post by pirate787 »

bigfudge wrote: post #484
drorco wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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