In my previous role at a large payroll provider, Equifax and few other players in the space over last two years were extremely interested in getting access to SMB payroll data, as it was the most economical way at scale to verify income for half of US labor force employed by SMBs.
Equifax was by far the most aggressive in both offering very generous compensation for that data and insistence as part of the deal on an opt out mechanism.
The employers software vendor Intuit steals the data and sells it to Equifax for their own profit. The employer gets nothing, but could decide to opt-out. The employee who's privacy is being grossly violated gets nothing and cannot even opt-out of sharing the data?
GDPR doesn't sound like such a bad idea now...
To be fair employees do get ~some~ value out of this, in form of of less paperwork verifying their employment during mortgage and rental applications. It's a different question whether it's valuable enough with all privacy downsides.
What's more, any time you remove the freeze to allow someone to verify the data, you have to remember to put it back again if you want it to remain otherwise private, instead of lifting it temporarily for hours or a day or one inquiry or one verifier.
Government employees’ pay information is public information, and they seem to function fine in the world. I like Norway’s public tax record system, price transparency would certainly help the vast majority of participants in the labor market.
Only Equifax having access and selling info to other large organizations is the worst of all worlds, though.