Salary? How could that being public serve the public's interest? As a privacy advocate that does pique my curiosity.
Even in the US you can look up the salary of many people (public university employees come to mind).
One of the most important moments early in my career was learning the salary of the people above me. It let me evaluate the upside of climbing that ladder for the next 5-10 years and ultimately helped me make a critical decision to leave and take a higher risk role where the upside was greater.
It could be argued that transparency in taxes collected is a positive thing for a society.
The whole privacy system is geared towards supporting employers and people in the upper echelons of salary.
Senior citizens are also targeted by criminals in Sweden, because the age and address of almost all citizens is publicly available. They might be visited by a couple who ask for a glass of water or whatever, and then one of the visitors distract the senior citizen while the other searches the place for jewelry.
I find this unconvincing - firstly, most crime happens in poor neighbourhoods.
Secondly, you don't need to know someone's salary to tell apart a rich neighbourhood or house from a poor one.
Thirdly, high salary does not mean you have anything to steal, my friend earns a lot but all him money is in mortgage, stocks or in the bank. All you could steal from his house is a laptop.
Lastly, even if everything you said was true, it doesn't mean we should cower and hide, it means police are not doing their job well enough.
That's kind of my point. Let's say you live in a poor neighborhood but do some stock trading and suddenly make a large profit. That will be shown in public records, it's not just salaries that are public. You now have a target on your back. Criminals will not come to your house looking for a laptop, they will come looking for you, putting a gun to your head telling you to transfer your assets to them.
> it means police are not doing their job well enough
Principles are nice, but pragmatism is better at keeping you alive...
You talk about pragmatism but give a crime scenario out of Hollywood movies.
Do you mean bank transfer? Am I transferring a million dollars into an official bank account registered in the criminal's real name?
Do you mean I should sign a deed giving them possesion of my house, and that would hold up in court?
Any large transfer will trigger a multi-day KYC and security process at the bank. Are they going to hold me hostage for weeks?
There is a much easier crime that pays better and does not involve risk of death and leaving your fibgerprints all over: stealing a car, an expensive car.
That's why there are more car thefts than home robberies.
https://www.expressen.se/kvallsposten/krim/man-misshandlad-o...
There are of course other ways to transfer assets than the ones you describe. And yes, one guy was held hostage for weeks:
The second "Bengtsson, 32, was abducted on January 17th in Gothenburg on his way to work at Siba, a family-owned nationwide home electronics retail chain of which he is managing director and which he will one day inherit."
Is your suggestion that if this information weren't public then no one would know that those men were rich and so they wouldn't have been robbed or abducted?
Because 1) poor people get robbed too, and 2) I usually think someone who lives in a castle, is often profiled in the news for one's wealth-related activities; or someone who is the managing director of a large chain store; probably has money - without having to check their tax records.
Were the attackers of Count Carl Piper ever found? You mentioned "foreign criminals" earlier, but why couldn't they be domestic?
Earlier you wrote "Senior citizens are also targeted by criminals in Sweden".
I'm from the US. Senior citizens are also targeted by criminals in US. Eg, see https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-scams-and-crimes... .
There's no need to know the person's age and address - go to a neighborhood with decent-looking houses and knock on doors pretending to offer services like re-roofing or driveway sealing. If the person who answers is old, and alone, try exactly the same technique you mentioned.
Or, take a down-payment for the roofing work then don't do it, like in https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2021/10/07/cgb-sus... .
Frustratingly, wage theft is very common in the US but not covered under criminal law. Quoting https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
> Wage theft—employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to—affects far more people than more well-known and feared forms of theft such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies. Employers steal billions of dollars from their employees each year by working them off the clock, by failing to pay the minimum wage, or by cheating them of overtime pay they have a right to receive. Survey research shows that well over two-thirds of low-wage workers have been the victims of wage theft.
Even in the US, different regions have different ways to measure the clearance rate, and as I pointed out with wage theft, even the concept of what is measured differs between jurisdictions.
I therefore find it hard to judge that a raw number like "14%" is easily comparable with other countries.
In researching this I found https://bra.se/bra-in-english/home/publications/archive/publ... from 2014, which makes a similar point:
> The aim is to find explanations for why Sweden has a lower clearance rate than the other countries, despite the fact that victim surveys show that real crime levels are roughly the same.
> One factor of relevance to differences in the clearance rate is the issue of differences in the way the police register crimes. In Sweden, for example, the method used to count the number of reported offences is less restrictive than those employed in the other countries. Several of the countries also use a definition of cleared offences that differs from that employed in Sweden. In some countries, it is sufficient to have registered a suspect on reasonable grounds for the offence to be considered cleared. In Sweden, however, an individual must either have been prosecuted for the offence or issued with a summary sanction order or a waiver of prosecution.
> Finally, the chapter presents an alternative method of measuring police effectiveness in the countries studied, namely the number of conviction decisions per 1,000 of population. Using this measure, Sweden is no worse than the other five countries; in fact, all of the countries lie at approximately the same level.
In that report the official clearance rates were:
Sweden 17
Norway 47
Denmark 18
Netherlands 25
Germany 54
England & Wales 27 / 29
Or, in Germany, "If the police consider that a reported incident does not meet these requirements, it is not registered as an offence in the crime statistics. In addition, statistics on reported offences do not include open cases.", and "The procedure employed to produce offence counts is also more restrictive than in Sweden, and employs the principal offence meth-od. Thus, if a perpetrator assaults two men on the same occasion, this is only counted as a single offence in Germany, while in Sweden it would be counted as two separate offences."
These are just some of ways that biases the official statistics in ways that make it difficult to compare numbers directly.