What can we do to stop privacy invasions like this?
Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
511–520 of 805 posts
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have a few aliases in there from when someone stole my identity. They refuse to remove them.
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#514In 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).
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
> 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 lo…
> Typically something that is of "public interest", e.g the highest earners.
Oh okay, so then it is pretty similar than in Finland!
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#516NOTE: 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 reques…
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....
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
>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.
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.
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#518Earlier 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…
> 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.
> When does that ever happen?
All the time. Debt is almost ubiquitous, and the vast majority of people and businesses use it productively.
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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.
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
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.