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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

Probably. But then that too will likely become public.

I forget which Scandinavian country this is true for but I think there exists a country where compensation is a matter of public record.

I support this 100%. I want everything to be transparent here. I know where I stand skills and competency wise compared to my colleagues so I will be ok making less than those I am less skilled or less productive as. That being said I think I’m underpaid. A transparent pay structure will only benefit the employees as we learn in Economics: the more information about prices there are in a situation the better each actor can make choices.

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It's Norway. The system is pretty neat actually in a way that all salaries are _registered_, but if you query someone, the other end figures out who queried you. So in that way, the data is still protected from large-scale scraping and has a slight reputation impact.

Do people use it or are they afraid that the other ends get to know their query?

Seems a bit like a way to persuade you to don't use it.

For large-scale scraping protection there are other options...

What prevents one person from just being "that asshole" and querying for everyone? What prevents a small hacktivist group from banding together to cover the space and then release it?

Nothing prevents anyone from being "that asshole" because nobody considers someone an asshole for researching their labor market.

The newspapers publish lists of the richest 100 in each municipality every year. It's a yearly tradition, and there are no significant protests against it.

fun fact, tax returns are technically public in Italy too, so you can ask and they will be shown to you (only the last year).

On one glorious day in 2008 the head of the tax office made them actually available online, and the system was DDoS'd by people snooping each other.

After that, the authority in charge of privacy protection declared that putting them online was a bad idea, and we have not had them since, but it was fun.

> I forget which Scandinavian country this is true for but I think there exists a country where compensation is a matter of public record.

It's Sweden.

I think it’s Finland. I’m in Sweden and I’m almost sure that my compensation is not public. What you can do IIRC is to request a credit check on someone which would contain the income and the tax paid but then the person is notified who requested the data. Typically this is done when you apply for a mortgage.

Paid tax and taxable income is public in Sweden, just call Skatteverket (Swedish IRS) and they'll send you the info on anyone you can name.

Edit: more info in Swedish here: https://lawline.se/answers/ar-inkomstdeklarationer-allmanna-...

In Sweden, Norway _and_ Finland.

The tax you pay is public record.

For example, in Sweden, you can get a 'tax calendar' (a bit like an old-fashioned phonebook, but with total pay instead of phone numbers). You can buy relevant pages conveniently online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxeringskalendern

It is a trivial division-by-twelve to determine the salary of your co-workers and neighbours.

In Spain the socialists tried to copy the Scandinavian model of tax information.

Very soon they realized terrorist groups like ETA or GRAPO used that information in order to extort, kidnap or kill family members of those that had high income in order to finance itself. Having access to that meant the ability to calculate the "revolutionary tax" for every entity with extreme precision.

So it was short lived, but on the Basque country they continued having access to that information because the political party that represented the terrorists had access to it.

Today travelling to places like Thailand or Mexico is extremely dangerous if they know you have money. They can kidnap your taxi driver, or put cocaine bags on you luggage.

I personally believe what I earn is nobody business but me and my family.

People have strong opinions about something they have never experienced, like socialism and communism. They really love those systems from outside, the grass is always greener on the other side.

ok yikes perhaps then salaries need not be public but at least everyone in a company should know what everyone is making. All this secrecy is stupid and helps no-one.

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