Who is selling the salary 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.

At least ADP, it would appear

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.

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?

And if you were, I suspect you are doing the candidate a favor.

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?

Wouldn't this just lead to lower offers all around?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!).

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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."

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

what is the work number? is this deliberately a confusingly made up name of company and what they do?

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?

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

No way, no how.

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.

When?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

Not all commerce should exist

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

When does that ever happen?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 happened in the entire Eastern Bloc.

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

By your logic, corporations are people too

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

There are good parts in GDPR for sure.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

It’s also what regular capitalism looks like.

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?)

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.

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

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 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.

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 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.

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?

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?

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

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?

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

Would equifax be the agent in this case?

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?

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.

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.

How much does it cost to get a list of everyone's salary at my company?

Maybe you can register a 1 person company and share your employee details for access to the platform.

* 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?