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Comment by alexanderstears | Hacker News Reader

They do - I'm not sure how they licence it though or what data sources they use but I've seen that their data on high income households is the best in the business and shockingly accurate.

However, I can't imagine the compliance nightmare that would exist around a process that lets HR people look up people's equifax information. If they get a full report, it could contain information about disabilities, national origin, ethnicity, religion, and enough information to construct knowledge about sexual orientation.

However, all that information is pretty worthless for most decisions. Aside from it being illegal to use that information for hiring decisions (in most situations), the equifax stuff isn't super accurate. I've looked myself up and it gets a lot of information wrong, most other people I know who have looked themselves up in have also found major inaccuracies.

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They (The work Number/Equifax) don't license it at all. Company's pay for the privilege in fact. It's sold as outsourcing the "costly" HR task of providing salary data themselves. Other companys or individuals then pay Equifax $35 to make a single enquiry or subscribe at a monthly rate.

Users include 82% of all F500 companies and they have 225 employment records.

My company uses it :(

http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/30/16762661-exclusi...

This is a pretty shocking news article regarding the last time Eqifax was in the news about this a few years ago. At that time (like now) they were selling the data to all kinds of companies.

Shameless plug for something I wrote today, in case you’re wondering what companies use it for and what you can do about that

“Developer employee cheatsheet: WTF is Salary Benchmarking?“

https://codeformore.com/developer-employee-cheatsheet-wtf-sa...

Interesting read, thanks. How does one go from "senior engineer" to "architect"? Any tips?

Stop writing code and start writing documents. Use lots of buzzwords and emerging technologies.

Well the first step is to design some architectures for large systems. Poof, you're an architect.

Can I use it to find out what my co-workers make and negotiate a better salary,

No. The FCRA makes you obtain premission from your coworker first.

You give permission to your employer to query those sorts of databases when agreeing to a "background check" as a condition of being hired.

If the employer needs permission, then they presumably don't get that permission if it's against this new law.

Wouldn't you need their social security number?

Luckily you can just download those from the internet.

I'm not sure how they licence it though or what data sources

Ever filled out a credit card application? Most of them ask for your current salary. This is before the credit check is done.

My guess is the credit card companies are passing that information back.

Of course, any time I put my salary in one of those applications it's correct in a range of $50K+. If they have those numbers, they are really inaccurate.

This makes me wonder. My employer has some customer data. We're very careful about not just letting any random employee access it without careful permission, auditing, logging, etc. Customer privacy is important to us.

At Equifax, though, information about random people isn't customer data. It's the product. They give it to anyone who asks for money. Do they have any motivation to say J random employee can't just look up everybody's data? Why? Letting you have free access to what they charge everyone else for would just be a perk, right?

I believe it's quid pro quo. Equifax sells analytics services to corporations, and presumably you get a nice discount if you enter into an agreement to give them your information.

Likewise for credit scores--why else would a lender report data to Equifax if Equifax wasn't purchasing that data, either directly or as part of a larger contractual arrangement.

> Do they have any motivation to say J random employee can't just look up everybody's data?

It violates FCRA at the very least.

Given that NSA employees in the past have abused that power, I wouldn't put it past current Equifax employees to do the same.

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-stalking/

There is nothing wrong with HR having that information. It's only illegal to base hiring/firing decisions on protected information, it's not illegal to have it.

Obviously it gets really tricky to prove someone did or did not use protected information in their hiring/firing decision, so it's clearly safest for HR to avoid having any of that.

Why would a resource department need information from payroll? They aren't the bosses of the employees so it's not like they are making the ultimate hiring decisions.

In your company that may be the case. Some (many, especially public) companies use HR as the initial resume filter. They are supposed to make sure the resume is accurate, the applicant didn't lie about job titles, dates of employment, education, etc, and sometimes the dreaded keyword scanning. Some places they'll also do the initial phone screen to make sure the applicant can form more-or-less coherent sentences. Then they give the person hiring a stack of screened resumes, and that person then does the interviews for the actual position in question.

And I have worked at places where HR could unilaterally veto a given employee based on certain criteria (education, background check, etc).

>what data sources they use

Usually the data is reported by the employer themselves.

You can query the employment data without querying the full Equifax report.

"... disabilities, national origin, ethnicity, religion, and enough information to construct knowledge about sexual orientation."

Don't employers already get most of that from doing in person interviews? Even through phone screens you can gather most of that information.

In the US, those are protected categories about which a prospective employer may not inquire. This point was explicitly called out and repeatedly reiterated in the training I received a few years back about how to participate in an interview from that side of the table.

Some of that information can be obvious, as in the case of visible disability and occasionally ethnicity. But it's not permissible to inquire in any case. And speaking from the side of the interviewee, such questions would immediately bring the interview to a not overly friendly close, both because the answers are none of any prospective employer's business, and because no company so insensate to liability concerns is likely destined to end up anywhere I care to go.

They can ask, legally. Maybe it would be used as evidence they wanted to discriminate but it's not a violation of the law simply to ask.

Unless the protected characteristic is in some material way relevant to the role, asking such questions is likely to contravene the law or laws establishing the protection. It's not a criminal act, but it is unlawful; to do so, without a very clear and compelling argument for why it's relevant to the candidate's ability to perform the job, places the organization at the mercy of any candidate who cares to file a claim.

This is false, it is generally not illegal to ask about protected characteristics, it's only illegal to use them in hiring decisions. The distinction is important.

The reason people avoid asking (and tell others to avoid the same) is to avoid accusations or the appearance of using that sort of information in their hiring decision. You really have no defense if you ask about ethnicity and then decide not to hire that person, it's logical that you were asking about ethnicity because you wanted to use that information in your decision.

"Don't ask don't tell" is a good policy.

Once you actually have the job it's STILL just as illegal to use this information in promotions/firing decisions. However, it comes up in casual conversation all the time. People don't fret about asking a subordinate where they were born in casual conversation.

It's more unwise than unlawful.

Fair. I sort of assumed from "don't even think about doing this unless you have signoff from general counsel in writing" that it was the latter, but on further research, I am indeed finding the former is more accurate to fact.

> In the US, those are protected categories about which a prospective employer may not inquire

No, they aren't. First, it's questionable whether sexual orientation is a federally protected axis of discrimination, and, second, it's illegal to discriminate on protected axes (except where they are bona fide qualifications, or some other exception to the general rule exists), not to enquire on them (HR will generally avoid enquiry not necessary for a clearly legal purpose to mitigate the risk that that will be viewed as evidence of discrimination, not because it is illegal in and of itself.)

> However, I can't imagine the compliance nightmare that would exist around a process that lets HR people look up people's equifax information.

Employment credit checks are perfectly legal.

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