Albanian prosecutors probe huge suspected leak of personal data | Hacker News Reader

Albanian prosecutors probe huge suspected leak of personal data

balkaninsight.com

105 pointslexoj125 comments

All taxable income is public in Finland as well, although the information comes with a delay of about 1 year, so you can't make out exactly how much your co-worker or neighbor makes right now.

I'm not fond of that if not just to prevent people from robbing me.

There is a strong relationship between: "A society strives for transparency and equality." and "It is unlikely to get robbed in a society".

Sounds idealistic not rooted in realism.

well, good luck trying to get robbed in Finland ...

Tax declarations are public information in e.g. Finland. You can easily find out what your neighbors or colleagues are earning. It's not causing many issues other than people having a better negotiation position when e.g. negotiating their salary with employers or having unions do so on their behalf.

In Albania, the interesting thing of course is that it is quite a bit less organized as a country and that it has a lot of issues with e.g. corruption, smuggling, etc. So the declared income only tells part of the story and it's all the off the book stuff that is really juicy and interesting. Corruption and tax dodging are highly private activities; just like other things you are not supposed to do. Only an issue if you have something to hide.

The right to graft, fraud, and theft are not protected by the UN declaration of human rights or most constitutions. Rather the contrary. But yet they are still widely spread in many countries. Transparency is one way to expose that.

>Corruption and tax dodging are highly private activities

>Transparency is one way to expose that.

Well yeah sure, but that's not what happened here. The transparency brought by this leak is only in regards to salaried (honest) people's wages, so the people who earn dirty money from corruption, bribes and other illegal activities are not impacted by this at all, as those deals are always off the books, usually in form of cash, maybe crypto nowadays, but often also in real estate or other gifts such as cars, artwork or various favors (I give your construction company this lucrative government contract, and in return your construction company will build my McMansion for free, or, you hire my son/nephew as an exec in your company).

So this leak most likely does not affect criminals at all, just people who probably had managed to secure incomes much higher than the median (tech workers, entrepreneurs, etc.)

Good for Finland. In other places, it's not nice to count other people's money, along with their prescriptions, medical conditions, and everything else that other people prefer to keep private. ("Transparency" without control over your own information telling the whole world vs. opt-in sharing.)

Were prescriptions leaked here? Otherwise where did that come from?

The thing is: your money is your money. But our neighbors taxes is our money, and the fact that they were paid correctly is our information. If one starts at that, then yes we count eachothers' money. But it's not as simple as "everyone should know everyones' private information". It's rather that the public part of the information (who pays their taxes properly etc) is public and that, as a negative side effect perhaps, gives the income data away.

Who knows, perhaps maintaining public tax ledgers while hiding the actual amounts is something that can be solved technologically by for example a blockchain.

Isn't this the norm in places like Sweden?

https://www.ft.com/content/2a9274be-72aa-11e7-93ff-99f383b09...

I suspect in the future all salaries will be public.

The requirement for state institutions to be transparent, in the Swedish constitution, goes a lot deeper than most other countries.

You can buy a book for the equivalent of $20 which contains the income information for everyone in a district. I bought one one year for half of Malmo.

Note that it's not salaries that are public per se, but how much you paid in taxes. For a typical person with few side incomes and 1 job, the taxable income is obviously very close to "salary".

I'm quite fortunate that I work for a company that's very transparent about pay now, but I've worked at a few places in the past where sharing your salary details was considered a serious offence. Obviously the point was to maintain paying as little as possible. I occasionally wonder what would have happened if the payroll database had ever been leaked, or if there was a leak from HMRC (UK version of the IRS). I strongly suspect it would have been the end of the company as a lot of people would have walked out.

You'd think that risk would have been enough to equalize the wages a bit, but it definitely wasn't the case at any of the places I experienced. I guess the existential risk is less of a threat than the cost savings are a benefit.

Doesn't law explicitly allow sharing this kind of data?

US law does. That may or may not be the case in the UK.

My contract (in the UK) explicitly states that sharing compensation or bonus details is considered gross misconduct, which is a dismissable offense.

This looks like a typical lie that employers like to put into contracts, and it seems it is: https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/09/can-your-boss-stop-you-talkin...

Well, it's not a lie that it's in my contract and that I signed it.

It is true that this clause is there in your contract, sure. But the clause itself is a lie - it’s void, because it contradicts the law, yet it is there, to make an impression that it’s not void.

There is no specific protection for it, but at the same time it also cannot be forbidden to be discussed. Employment protection in the UK is string enough that you cannot just fire someone for discussing it.

UK: you may discuss your pay to see if there's any discrimination (gender etc). (Maybe in other circumstances too, I'm not sure)

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/77

There is no "the law", you'd need to be specific about which market you're talking about.

I don't know. I've never needed to talk to a lawyer about it thankfully. If it is something that's explicitly protected then plenty of companies are getting it wrong.

Not the OP. I believe that's the case in the US, but here in Canada, there generally aren't any laws against it. There was a bill in Ontario in 2018 that banned reprisals against workers who discussed their pay, but it died when the governing Liberal party lost the election and the Conservative party did not follow through. As far as I know, the practice is not banned in Alberta either.

In the US, it’s only on a voluntary individual basis. For example, an HR employee that knows all employees pay information can be prohibited from sharing that information but cannot be prohibited from discussing their own pay.

That information is under pretty tight lock and key in the UK, perhaps for specifically this reason. I'd say the risk is pretty minimal.

Yeah only ransom and kidnapping. In France a guy was kidnapped by mistake because he was jewish and his smart kidnapper thought all jews were rich. He died.

Now at least with such a list the risk of mistake is minimal, only genuine high earners would be kidnapped, is that what you're saying?

> Obviously the point was to maintain paying as little as possible

Is this the only reason one would want to withhold disclosing everyone's salary?

Full disclosure would likely lead to one salary for every person in that role. But anyone that's spent any time in a company knows that not everyone is the same. I would hope top performers get paid better than mediocre or below average employees. And if everyone had all the info, that would open up huge legal liability due to the perception of bias.

There would also be complaints and comparisons across roles as well. There's also the privacy component.

I think the idea of pay transparency but in practice if you dump everyone's salaries it would case a disturbance and a huge cultural shift in an org that didn't disclose salaries before.

>Full disclosure would likely lead to one salary for every person in that role.

Why? We have existing systems with full transparency (e.g. CA state employees) and this proposed trend has never come to pass

I'm in the US military, and although there isn't a public spreadsheet with a line for "warner25: $xxx,xxx" you could work out my income if you knew my rank, years of service, location, etc. along with how our pay is structured. Most people outside the system (i.e. my parents and extended family) wouldn't work this out easily, and probably think that my income is much lower than it really is. My co-workers, on the other hand, could probably figure out my income down to the last penny. I think this arrangement doesn't cause strife for two reasons that don't apply to most citizens in the private sector:

1. We knew the deal (how we would get paid, and that it's public knowledge) when we signed up. It's a not a leak.

2. Even if some higher paid co-worker seems like a clown or worse (toxic and counter-productive), we all know exactly what it takes to reach that same level of pay... i.e. a well-defined and generally attainable combination of years, education, certifications, and experiences to get promoted. So you don't need to pay everyone the same amount for the same role, but you do need this kind of deterministic structure.

It seems like number 2, in particular, has no equivalent in the private sector where pay is based on fluid market competition and negotiation and the whims or biases of hiring managers.

Airlines pay just like that (as do taxi companies and most other parts of the transportation industry). Guess what you all have in common? Zero agency. So when you take a job where the ideal output of your labor is 100% deterministic, then it makes sense for your pay to reflect that.

Good point. I was thinking about white-collar knowledge workers but you're right that this exists for many private sector employees who get paid by the hour or have a union.

I met with some SF city officials a few years ago to discuss a program that our company was going to run for the city. I've never interacted with a less competent group of people, and we withdrew our proposal simply because we were scared of being affiliated with them in any shape or form. Looking back on what happened to the city since then, it all makes sense.

I wonder if the full transparency you're talking about is a part of how the city managed to attract and retain such talent pool. I know that for all of my career I've been worker harder than my peers and have also been compensated accordingly. If someone told me "oh no, [person who I know is less productive] has the same title as you and he never comes late to work, so you can't make more than him," that for sure would have been our last conversation at work.

I don't know why most companies don't want to disclose salaries, but every startup I've led did that in order to pay more, not less. You basically look for the most exceptional talent in the world, and then you pay them every last penny you can afford. Same with retention - you want to promote people based on what the market would pay for them, regardless if your current org structure allows for a title promotion (you can only have one senior leader per department at any given time). If I had to disclose everyone's salary, that would only lead to more constraints with being generous on my end, not less.

Seems like a good reason to establish a proper performance evaluation review process, with a clear scale for bonuses and salary increases.

This makes it fair for everyone and reduce the possibility of biases by the managers.

If someone finds their salary unfair, then both the employer can argue more precisely why or why not.

> I would hope top performers get paid better than mediocre or below average employees.

What if those top performers aren't aware of their worth and/or aren't good at negotiating their salaries within that market?

I've heard about plenty of oblivious people who had existential crises when they discovered that those around them made much more money than they did, even when they were good at what they did, or had been at the company for a long time.

It's definitely a multi faceted issue! Of course, one might also take the role based approach: "In company X, the employees in the role Y are compensated in a range from Z to W, here's an anonymous histogram. Here's some metadata about how the length of employment is positively/negatively correlated with earnings."

I don't have illusions that companies would actually be interested in doing anything like that, because although disclosing salary ranges for a job position is now mandatory in my country, you still see something like 2000-5000 EUR ranges which are almost meaningless (due to how most people will hover around the lower end as far as the actual compensations go).

> I would hope top performers get paid better than mediocre or below average employees

We have bonuses for that. No need to deceive people into taking less than others. Bonuses also have the advantage of being tied to your actual performance, while giving a rockstar salary to a new hire won't guarantee you better performance than other employees paid less for the same role. Or you could have salary ranges for roles. What's always unexcusable to me is lacking transparency and gaining competitiveness by deception.

Now imagine you share it with criminals. Do you imagine a few creative ways to use such a list ? That's what Albania did.

Most wealthy people are by having your own business and the end of year revenue/profit bilanc is already public.

Actually, I don't see a scandal in this, all income should be in the public domain. In fact it is, in various contexts: public workers salaries are public in the US, in my country tax sheets are public record, you only need to identify yourself to get them.

I don’t want my family members asking me for money saying “I know how much you make.” I don’t want criminals targeting me knowing my income.

Could it be public just linked to role and not name? Still has issues with roles that are unique enough to be identifying though.

In the US, we have reasonably good survey information at the occupation level, see https://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm

It’s big downsides are that it’s missing information about seniority/tenure, benefits and might struggle with uncommon pay methods like stock grants. However, with other resources like Glassdoor I feel you can get a decent picture of the pay situation for a given role in the US.

There's a big difference between someone saying "I see on LinkedIn you're a Staff Software Engineer at Google and you make at least $500K" and being able to brush them off with "don't believe everything you read" and actually having government tax records in hand.

Does not sound as a healthy family dynamics.

Healthy dynamics would be: they talk about their problems and you offer your help, based on your availability. When family actually asks for money I am happy to help all the more.

I want criminals to leave me be because they know my income.

I really don't understand the criminal's point: it's like people ordinarily live in rags to hide their availability. This is not how it works, as I can see: people typically try and show off more than what they really have, why aren't they afraid of criminals?

> all income should be in the public domain.

Would you mind sharing your passport data and income numbers here so that it becomes public domain?

Is it not obvious that one person's data being public (and the resulting information asymmetry) is a lot different than everyone's data being public?

it's not obvious, could you clarify why does it make a difference whether there are more people sharing such data with you? For instance, if I believe that open-source projects have to be released with a public domain license (effective zero license), it doesn't matter if others want to follow my example, I can still apply my beliefs onto my projects to my own percieved benefit.

This is the same argument as ”if you want higher taxes why don’t you donate money to the state?”, which is of course a non-argument.

Taxes (and thus income) is public information in several countries and they don’t appear to be Orwellian hellscapes.

> This is the same argument as ”if you want higher taxes why don’t you donate money to the state?”, which is of course a non-argument.

why is it a non-argument if everyone knows that talking the talk is different from walking the walk? Higher taxes is not a means to itself, it has a specific goal of funding causes that you care about. Now, if there's a cause that you deeply care about, why wouldn't you donate your own money towards that cause as a matter of your exercising your free will instead of desiring that everyone else are unuiformly forced into following your ideals?

Taxes and charity are two completely different things.

People can indeed donate. But arguing “I think there should be more public spending on X and I’d be willing to pay higher taxes for it” a political position.

Not sure if you are insinuating that anyone who holds this political position but does not donate money towards the cause are somehow hypocrites?

“Desiring that everyone else are forced to follow your ideals” is basically what most politics is about when it comes to public spending and taxes.

> Taxes and charity are two completely different things.

I couldn't agree more with it. One is a compulsory extortion, another is a voluntary action.

> Not sure if you are insinuating that anyone who holds this political position but does not donate money towards the cause are somehow hypocrites?

I'd like to understand why certain people would rather prefer a compulsory extortion for everyone than a voluntary action for themselves and other like-minded people. Even at the level of the mentioned politics, public spending is not especially effective and efficient approach towards funding your causes [1].

[1] https://www.thecity.nyc/2019/4/4/21211167/no-relief-as-price...

> I'd like to understand why certain people would rather prefer a compulsory extortion for everyone than a voluntary action for themselves and other like-minded people

I think if you don’t understand that already, it’s likely I can’t help you understand either. I suggest traveling to and reading about functioning welfare states and high-tax societies. Perhaps it’ll clear up. If not, reading and traveling is rarely a waste!

> I think if you don’t understand that already, it’s likely I can’t help you understand either.

But expressing your reasoning here doesn't have to be predicated purely on your percieving my capacity to understand it. You could just express it in a token of good will. I've switched three countries with three different languages so far. Coming from one of the currently non-existing Soviet states, I think I've got a pretty useful cultural and political background to understand and see the real difference between welfare- and small-government states than most of westerners by birth out there.

I'm just one data point, and I'm all for a large-ish government and high-ish taxes but I'd be happy to answer a concrete question if you have one. Was it approximately "why would anyone vote for higher taxes to fund a larger state", was that correct? You should be able to find around 50% of the people around you ready to vote for that (regardless of what the current tax level is!)!

That was my point - given that's basically the position of half the humans around you are you seriously wondering that, or is it rhetorical?

I don't know if passport data is supposed to be confidential (i.e. if it can be misused), but I have no compunctions about sharing my salary information. Last month I made the equivalent of $5615 (after deducting pension payments), from which I paid $1886 in taxes.

It's ultimately subjective what counts as "personal information", but my income is not me, nor is it particularly about me. I think it would be fine for it to be public by default, as in Norway.

> but I have no compunctions about sharing my salary information.

the difference here is that unless there's person-identifying information (which the article mentions as "personal data"), it's not yet _your_ salary information, because we don't know who you are. But if you provided a few more non-confidential details about yourself, such as the name of the company you are employed by, your role and the department, then even without disclosing your confidential details, the provided salary is a lot more valuable piece of information about you. There are numerous outsiders with a various range of intents that might find this information about your economical wellbeing extremely valuable.

My name is Troels Henriksen and I work as assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen. That is a unique combination, so it identifies me as a person. I'm not averse to my income being connected to my identity.

Nice to meet you Troels. If you don't mind, I've got a few more clarifying questions:

- Is it your only source of income?

- Do all assistant professors at your University earn the same amount of money or is it based on individually chosen fields of research / classroom hours they take?

> - Is it your only source of income?

Yes, except for a small amount of passive investment income.

> - Do all assistant professors at your University earn the same amount of money or is it based on individually chosen fields of research / classroom hours they take?

It is the same or very close. The university publishes the average salary for an assistant professor and I am pretty close. It is possible to negotiate salary on a per case basis, but my impression is that it's quite rare except for at the very top.

There's a list in the university newspaper. (It's probably on the university site somewhere.)

https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-of-university-of-copenhagen...

For sure, as soon as everybody shares his own

When I was working in the public sector everyone flew off the handle when a local journalist requested all salary information and published it. Feathers flying everywhere for weeks. I loved it.

The journalist wanted everyone in this poor community to know how many six figure incomes were being doled out at the college. Very comfortable stress-free lives for people with connections while everyone serving them was basically destitute. I was making $12 an hour building software at the time.

Please someone come do this in New Orleans

But can others get them ? I mean imagine I'm Youssuf Fofana (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ilan_Halimi#Gang_o...) and I decide to be smart and kidnap for ransom only high earners in a low security district to get tolerable rewards, I could optimize kidnapping to get the lowest risk/reward ratio much more easily, as I d know exactly who earns how much.

I dont mind telling people I trust my salary, but I mind telling people who want my money ...

When your personal data is stored in company/government databases, never consider “if” your data will be leaked, but “when”.

Many people in commenter are confusing transparency and theft.

Transparency is something that should be regulated by law, but this is a data leak, and it can't be viewed positively.

I don’t think anyone here that argues that the information should have been public means that this makes it a non-issue. If it was in fact not public, then it’s a problem.

The argument when one argues that it’s not very sensitive is that it’s not a huge scandal for not-very-sensitive info to leak.

In the US military, you could figure out exactly what anyone made, because it was based on a rank + tenure formula that did not have many exceptions. There was some regional stuff around housing allowances, hazard pay, etc, but that was also formula driven. The "secret" then, was about how to get promoted faster, and not what your pay was. Not that it's a solution for the private sector, but it was easy to understand.

Don’t forget reenlistment bonuses- those can be quite substantial and, while formula driven, are complex enough to be opaque.

Pretty much all federal/state compensation is public info. Here's info for Ohio - https://checkbook.ohio.gov/Salaries/

I can search for my wife by name and find her salary from previous years.

Ah, it was a while ago. Government civilians also had "GS<some number>" pay grades, but it was less easy to find out what <some number> they were, since no uniforms.

This reminds me of that time, two or so years ago, when almost everyone's personal ID in Bulgaria was released and similar data could have been obtained for almost any adult.

Quite embarrassing and dangerous. Stuff like this should be a wake up call and indication of worse things to come

The only good thing about all this is that I've been looking for a site just like this for a long time. Bookmarked.

A salary is the contract between the employer and the employee, it should remain a secret unless one of the two wants to disclose it.

It's amazing how some people value privacy so much to an almost "irrational" degree, but then are perfectly fine making this sort of info "public".

i think the reason some of us value the privacy is because we're on the higher end of the pay spectrum. And while many people think that making this information public will benefit everyone, I just see it as a way of reducing my potential ceiling (money is finite, this is a zero sum game) and causing animosity amongst my coworkers and friends.

And frankly, not a lot of people can handle being told they aren't as good as their coworker, which is why they make less.

That's what I'm telling the IRS next year.

The reasoning behind having it public is (I believe) that it lets people see that the taxes are paid. A bit like court processes are public because you wouldn’t trust the system if it took place behind closed doors.

I heard that having this data led to the destruction of Nokia as it bred huge resentment and jealousy among employees who had joined later because of lower upside from stock.

Transparency leads to accountability

Income transparency increases the chances of becoming a victim of a crime.

Citation required

If that was true crime would be higher in countries where this information is public.

Facts seems to point to the inverse correlation.

In my opinion, there is a difference between living in a country where all salary information is assumed public (and all personal decisions taken accordingly), and a country where salary information was kept confidential from people around you until it was abruptly made public without notice.

I am really trying to understand how both situations could feel the same to you but...I guess I would need some help convincing.

Fully agree. And tbh I am quite astonished to see so many comments in this page that seem to advocate otherwise.

Disclosing salaries with identities can endanger many individuals, and not because they cheated the system or committed a crime.

It feels like advocating for full disclosure on who bets on what in stock trading.

Why would that occur, and why rely on obscurity for security rather than changing the structural fundamentals that lead to danger?

Any Albanians on here who can validate if their own salary is in the list?

I need to see the list first, anyone got a link to share?

"...Any other use of it is a criminal act, which endangers the social order by violating the private security of every citizen,"

I hear this in a deep and booming Orwellian voice. What specific danger does this put anyone in? I certainly can see the owners of capital being upset when their workers find out how egregious the disparity of income is, but outside of that?

That is the only reason. The only parties that benefit from lack of price transparency are large buyers and sellers. In this case, large buyers of labor would be big or well funded employers, and large sellers would be people selling their labor for above average prices.

> What specific danger does this put anyone in?

Targeting by organised crime

Targeting for home invasion

Targeting for extortion

Targeting in general

On the whole you can infer the wealth of someone from the type of home, the type of car, etc, and if you're trying to get money from someone, someone with large assets is likely to be far more lucrative than someone with a large salary

I doubt this happens - in the USA you can find the owner for virtually any property and high income areas don’t necessarily see more organized crime

I have had individuals use my public property records in social engineering attempts. They were dumb enough to use a registered number so they knocked it off when I responded with their name and address in return, but I am sure more voracious criminals have targeted homeowners.

Yes. Firstly, I understand all the reasons why sharing salary information gives more power to employees. However, as someone living in a third world country with serious crime problems, sharing my salary makes me more of a target than if it were kept secret. I understand this may not be the case everywhere, but it is a reality of the part of the world I live in.

It might also open you up to various forms of discrimination, if your salary is "too high" or "too low" for some people's liking.

I think pay transparency within a single company is probably a good thing, though.

Put it in a different perspective.

If a highly skilled and more valuable employee is making 2x his or her peers then this type of disclosure reduces the companies ability to retain said employee.

For instance, now everyone will demand a raise and the company will potentially have to lay off some employees to ensure a higher salary and same profit.

Alternatively, the most qualified people may leave. There are times where smaller companies may pay much higher for the right people in the right positions.

Here in Norway all salaries are publicly searchable*. Based on my experience of this, I can't see what bad things will come of this?

If anything, hidden salaries only benefit employers, as they have all the knowledge.

* you can know everyone's taxable income and net worth. What deductions people have, other incomes etc aren't separated, so it's not an exact number.

Does this mean you know how much your neighbors make? In America that would be very taboo…

I worked for a public university in America, therefore being a public employee. Any of my neighbors could easily go to the state website and look up my income.

Frankly, I never felt that to be an issue. It was also nice to have that transparency in the workplace, all of my colleagues knew exactly how much any of us made.

The press will publish all the highest earners in various segments, areas etc. So in the small municipality I'm from I'm used to the salaries and net worth of all the local business owners being in the newspaper.

In addition one can online search for whoever you want. Later years, one has to log in to check, and then the other person can see who have viewed their information. This has probably cooled it a bit. But can just get someone else to check for you..

This isn't a total cultural norm, if anything I think it's a view from america a few generations ago. For instance all of my friends and extended friend groups are open about our incomes.

With complete total strangers I would totally agree people generally don't lead with their salary. But after knowing people for a while it's come up a bunch and it's a taboo.

We’re talking public record, which means total strangers.

As I understand it, you can also see exactly who has looked up your salary info, so it might make for some awkward conversations if your neighbour did search for you.

As a added point, the system in Norway was fully open up to a few years back. They have since changed it in a way that you need to login to lookup other people income and the person in cause then gets notified of whom looked it up. So that typically could end up in an ackward look from/towards your neighbors .

That's Norway man it cannot be compared with rest of the world. In Albania or Balkan countries it would be very dangerous to leak such and info, people could die or be kidnaped or been looked differently, normally u don't tell your salary to anyone just like that.

That would be for example considered in Germany a huge breach of the citizens privacy. Simply unimaginable if you were raised in a country like Germany or US and i certainly support this to be private data.

What if the benefits outweigh the downsides? It's not black and white.

What benefits? If i dont want this data to be public that is my decision which should be respected. I am glad that this is also the stance of my government.

Harder to hide tax avoidance if everyone knows the ballpark of what you make. If you buy a new car each year but pay nothing in taxes, it's immediately obvious.

It can help lessen pay gaps. Between genders or other groups. Removes the power from the employers when you know what you should make.

Makes it easy to see if someone is making loads of money while underpaying their employees.

That only works because Norway is a tiny homogeneous country .

(yes I know some Norwegian will angrily reply about how that's false, I have plenty family that emigrated there from West Africa but let's be real... if the US is the melting pot, Norway is the slightly warm shot glass.)

Add in large amounts of diversity, not just in terms of race but also in terms of socioeconomics and suddenly it doesn't work.

Could this not be a small part in maintaining a smaller socioeconomic difference? Hard to underpay someone when they know what their role should pay.

Lol no, it couldn't for any meaningful definition of "small part" if we're being realistic.

We're not talking about examining a black box here, you can just look at Norway's socioeconomic history and realize is not because they share salaries.

Not mismanaging profit from massive natural oil reserves, tiny relative population to all their resources (not just oil), and having a largely homogeneous population that valued education and social benefit.

All such major factors that sharing salary can't really be considered a meaningful data point.

It's more an effect of their situation than the opposite, they can still share salaries because things went so well, and the idea is to catch people who are abusing the tax collection system.

A quick search shows that while you could theoretically get someone's salary historically, it wasn't until the early 2000s it was made easy (presumably by making a standardized digital system)

Then in 2014 they added alerting to know who looked which resulted in a 90% drop in inquiries...

Dont "lol no" people in a discussion, behave better.

Throwing a tantrum as soon as you don't have anything left to say...

If I had left it at "lol no" (it was a funny point just looking at the country you're talking about...) at least I could see why you're upset.

But instead I still proceeded to break down why you're wrong in quite a detailed manner and school you a bit on the topic so you can go forward with a better informed view of the country.

The customary reply there isn't a tantrum, it's a "thank you" or a "that's interesting for me to learn". Some people really do forget how to behave the moment another person doesn't agree with them.

You're really full of yourself, aren't you?

But fine, thank you for schooling me in arrogance.

These are not just some particular profession salaries. The article says it identifies persons, their profession AND their salaries. And such list, as you could guess, is an enormous privacy breach.

As others are saying, it's the norm in some places and, in the US, it's common among government employees (who have more rigid pay scales anyway). Of course, highly paid individuals including the top-compensated people at public companies and pro athletes also have public salaries.

So it's not really some deep dark secret. That said, if a bunch of big companies in a place where public salaries aren't the norm decided to make everyone's salary public one day, you'd have a huge amount of blowback and it would be followed by a whole lot of internal gripes from people who think they should be making more than "Joe" is.

Isn’t that exactly the opposite of being Orwellian? Privacy of citizens is at stake.

Sharing information and knowing something you are not supposed to is indeed Orwellian. It's not the absence of privacy that defines Orwells's 1984, it's government monopoly on it and all the information flows in general.

Well I mean, yeah nobody will die except for the odd ransom when people can compile target lists more easily but I dont know Albania enough, just like if all health record were released. People you know would giggle a bit, then blah move on.

However, it's still quite infuriating. First, salary comparison are usually irational and lead to toxic jealousy more than social justice: I think it's not right to do that without at least public consultation and you should not defend it as "not a big deal". It is.

>>I certainly can see the owners of capital being upset when their workers find out how egregious the disparity of income is, but outside of that?

There is this idealistic belief that knowing salary will make all people better off. I also find it laughable the notion that "owners of capital" will be the only ones upset, as opposed to 50+% of us who merely have somebody that makes more money, or the other 50% of us who now have a painted target (not necessarily just for simple physical theft; but also resentment and social consequences).

I may be a cynic in my old age, but I don't see easy mandatory connecting dots between "Share salary information" "Step ???" "Everybody Profit!".

I have not yet met a single person in my life - friend, family, acquaintance, colleague, team member, boss, personal nemesis, whoever -- that openly and with full self-awareness says "yes, I'm not very good; I don't work very hard; I should be getting paid less than this other person".

What I see day in and day out is everybody wanting the best of everything. And fair enough! It would be irrational to desire less for yourself and your family.

So if you have 10 people and they're on a bell curve in performance and happen to be on a perfectly matching bell curve in salary, if anybody here believes that open salary information will result in 10 out of those 10 people being happy and satisfied with their situation... well, I want to join you in your fantasy world of unicorns and rainbows. In reality, 9 people would want to have the same salary as your top performer, while not being willing or able (but primarily willing) to invest effort, work, ownership, responsibility... and eventually the other top performer quitting too as they were harassed, resented, bullied at work. Eventually you'll settle in an equilibrium with mediocre performers getting same mediocre salary. But this seeming "equality" is not necessarily the idealistic optimal point it may seem.

I won't go as far as to say this is human nature. This may just be cultural artifact and conditioning in parts of the world I've lived in. Perhaps there exist cultures where people have more self-awareness and satisfaction with "their lot in life", i.e. their effort/reward ratio; and more allowances and comfort that others make more or less. I can 100% see Iain Banks' Culture operating differently:). Maybe there are enlightened countries where this is already the case... I have yet to live in Scandinavia :P. But not where I'm standing.

(I may be slightly grouchy today... but I stand by the gist of the statement :P )

Owners of captal don't take income! Simply take an negative-interest loan using your captial as collateral

Only the working class are dumb enough to pay

Sooner or later it's going to happen in a large country like the US as well, it's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHEN. And that's going to be quite amusing to see unfolding.

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