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Comment by skinkestek | Hacker News Reader

I have an ex boss who at some time told me he used to look up names of ex employees to verify that none of them earned more after they left that company

He paid decently, true, but givrn the way things developed (he had a couple of seriously toxic senior engineers) I'm happy to say that I went to 20-40% (depending on how you look at bonuses, in Norway that is a lot anyway) higher salary in my next job and have kept getting raises since :-)

Now the two problems have departed, he wanted me back twice and I wanted to go back but he couldn't afford my current price.

Sad for both parts.

Edit: in Norway taxable salary and taxable wealth used to be publicly available.

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Possibly of interest to HN readers, California state employee salaries are all public, including UC and CSU professors.

Used to be? Is it no longer public?

It's still public, but now it is behind a login, and people can see who has looked at their tax info.

Out of interest, what would be a socially acceptable reason to lookup someone's info?

Now: next to none.

Before: anything. Everybody did it if they had the slightest reason if my observations were correct. Just like I remember Norwegians taking a sauna (those who had) with friends or family or showering before swimming or after exercise at school, nobody thought about the fact that they were naked between peers it seemed.

Today every kid complains about showering at school and everyone are very secretive about their income records.

This is just observation, not judgement. I think there are good reasons on both sides of both questions even if I am conservative as few (not American "conservative", I just think it is smart to change society slowly and thoughtfully).

Yes that was my point. When it was publicly accessible for everyone there wasn't a problem, but now that the information has to be explicitly requested (and the subject is alerted and provided the requestor's details) I was curious as to whether there were still any socially-acceptable reasons to request that info.

The only I can think of is journalism and similar.

Looking up colleagues' salary maybe?

To enable ones own salary negotiations as a rational economic actor (TM)?

It's semi-public.

Previously, up until 2010-ish?, newspapers etc. could ask for the public tax records from the government and make them searchable.

Now that's not possible, but they are free to list the 10-50-100 richest people in each municipality, the sports people earning the most, the business mean with the highest wealth or lowest tax etc.

Everyone can still look up individuals, though, but they have to log in to a government portal to do it, _and_ the individual being looked up will be notified about it, and who did it.

Looking up random strangers seems like a fun hobby. "Who is this person, and why is she looking me up? Is it someone I worked with? Someone I should remember? Am I such a terrible friend that I forgot about her completely?"

In Finland the system is similar, but recently changed in a somewhat entertaining way. The tax office used to publish a summary list of highest earning individuals for media's benefit. Then some politicians got involved and demanded that you should be able to deny being on that list. So now they compile a list of people who have denied the tax office from listing them.

Turns out there's no legal grounds for keeping the other list secret, so the media gets a copy of that list through some sort of transparency request. They then ask the tax office for the income information for each of these people. So now the yearly "jealousy lists" are published with all the names just as before, but some names have an asterisk next to them, pinpointing that these people didn't want to be on the list.

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