Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

Post by randmeerkat » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:31 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #152

snambi wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expe…

Post by olliej » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:32 AM UTC

cmeacham98 wrote: post #125

BeefySwain wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by brailsafe » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:34 AM UTC

Post by arwhatever » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:35 AM UTC

_3u10 wrote: post #170

It’s doubtful it comes from your employer, it more likely comes from credit applications.

Post by otterley » Fri, Jan 07, 2022, 6:36 AM UTC

MichaelBurge wrote: post #248

ouEight12 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inc…

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.