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Comment by landemva | Hacker News Reader

The credit bureaus are moving in to work/payroll verification by hoovering payroll data that US companies voluntarily give to them. They sell access to data to people verifying income for loan application, and law offices, and child support services.

I got job offer and told recruiter to put in writing that my payroll data will not be released without a court subpoena. Am waiting on response from recruiter. My outlook is that HR does not care about employees if they purposefully leak this info.

Those concerned may want to ask their HR about payroll data sharing.

https://www.experian.com/consumer-information/employment-inc...

https://theworknumber.com

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This can be more complicated in certain industries where a relationship with a credit agency is otherwise required. I worked at a fintech b2b lending company a while back that worked closely with all the big agencies and I distinctly recall that the company got favorable rates for opting in to payroll sharing when negotiating rates for other services from Experian.

It was sadly before my tenure at the company and I only became aware of it much later, but I would not be surprised if agencies are leveraging their other produces to incentivize more companies to share this salary data.

In the meantime I'm going to continue exercising CCPA wherever I can and hope we see some legislation or court cases at the federal level to address some of these issues.

I mean, from what you’re saying, it’s complicated in the sense that the credit bureaus are exploiting their customer’s greed, because if the customer really cared about their own employees, they would say no to the discounted rates, and that would be the end of that. No?

You're correct, but I believe this line of thinking is a simplification. If you operate a public company and your shareholders demand a return, odds are you'll have a board that's going to force you to have specific policies. Some of those policies are along the lines of "take any discounts you can get on things that cause operational expenses."

The only real way around this is having shareholders that care about employee privacy, and I think _that_ will only happen if these privacy issues impact the bottom line in some way (difficulty hiring, increased costs, etc).

It's frustrating in that this behavior is cultural and endemic to how businesses operate in the US. Change is possible, but it requires support from more than just the line of business employees and management.

> but I believe this line of thinking is a simplification

Yea, sure. I wasn't meaning to take a hard moralist or anti-system stance, when I say "the company is greedy" I understand the company and its people are a cog in a larger machine.

There is a simpler way out than waiting for a cultural change to stop that practice, though: regulation.

I'm not entirely sure, but I doubt that here in Europe it's so easy for companies to sell payroll data - if at all legal. At any rate it sounds like an abhorrent practice.

> If you operate a public company and your shareholders demand a return, odds are you'll have a board that's going to force you to have specific policies. Some of those policies are along the lines of "take any discounts you can get on things that cause operational expenses."

There's a lot of mythology around that, however: managers are giving a large amount of discretion about business decisions because it's extremely rare that there are no trade-offs for any decision. For example, you could save a lot of operational hosting expense by switching from AWS to Bob's Bait Shack and Server Farm. In this case, you could argue that the risk to employees is significant and would potentially spill over to the company if leaked information was used to compromise them.

You can freeze the worknumber so people running background checks can't get information. When I changed jobs the company ran a background check and they kinda freaked out cause they couldn't get anything out of this database. I loved it.

Gartner has predicted by 2038, the average American will spend 17 hours per day opting out of things they never opted into.

Do they predict what percentage of trackers this continuous coke-filled click-fest will actually disable?

They did not, because the number wasn't estimated by adding up predicted time per tracker or service, but by determining this is about the maximum the market can bear - i.e. a steady state of the system.

Curiously, Stratfor also predicted 60% chance of the US going to war with the EU before 2036, due to EU privacy regulation threatening to shut down the increasingly adtech-based US economy.

This serious analysis is stupider than the entire plot of Idiocracy.

I can’t tell if that’s a real report or something from The Onion.

“How to freeze your work number”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212195

I would do the verification over email as that means they didn't typo whatever email you gave them (easier to typo an email address rather than a phone number).

You still need to email them two forms of identification (personal ID and mailing address) then it takes three days.

I wonder if security of the payroll data lookup is even worse than the credit report website. A 'freeze' may be worthless if the data leaks are large. And a person making $18/hour to do child support case management may interested in making extra cash by looking up other people for a fee.

> I got job offer and told recruiter to put in writing that my payroll data will not be released without a court subpoena.

Doesn't this kind of demand usually just result in you not getting the job?

It would be a bullet dodged if so

Yeah, probably more often than not. But if you've got in-demand skills and can afford to be choosy, then go for it if it's important to you.

Not all companies give out payroll data. Better to learn now if finance/HR doesn't protect their employees and to decline the offer. Lack of qualified applicants ... or people have had enough. I do not consent.

They should also ask their mortgage and auto loan provider. I was running a consultancy when Paysa came online. We were surprised to see it knew a lot about compensation and titles of most of my employees. But not all of them. We found that the common thread was employees who had recently applied for loans/mortgages. They had submitted paystubs as part of the application process which were then sold.

I happened to chat with HR when I did the opt-out. They claimed, which I didn't believe, that most employees actually benefit from it because they get streamlined approval for personal loans and mortgages. I think it's just a way for them to cut down on support requests from employees (like "Hey HR I urgently need you to provide my last three pay stubs or employment verification letters").

Lol HR have an arsenal of excuses/bs on hand, always. “Most employees actually benefit” Christ

https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/comments/v4y76m/how_to...

Unfortunately you won't stop the tide with simple data practices. If they can't slurp up the the data automatically, they have an army of people making phone calls to gather employment data from other sources to add to their database.

We use them as a provider (unfortunately), and when they don't have the data on hand we have to handle cases where it can take a few days for them to call the business and confirm employment directly with someone who works there. At that point, I don't think where you work has a reasonable expectation of privacy since you walk there, probably put it on your LinkedIn, talk about it with friends/family, etc.

> put it on your LinkedIn

I stopped doing that when LinkedIn added their loginwall.

Clearly LinkedIn wants to harvest data while at the same time making it difficult for others to do so, which would go against my interest of making it public.

So I posted it on my own website. Goodbye to another centralized point of failure/control.

People are lazy. If they can't get the information a very large portion of them will rubber stamp it or just ask you if it's true, possibly to provide some evidence which they will be to lazy to verify as authentic.

>it can take a few days for them to call the business and confirm employment directly with someone who works there

If you hire out this kind of work, half the min wage slaves getting screamed at with hot breath down their neck for "low productivity" are gonna call once at most and likely not at all and then check it off. Speaking as someone who has worked at a call center along with the populace which was basically people on work release/probation.

> If they can't get the information a very large portion of them will rubber stamp it

They'll just toss your application out without a human ever seeing it. You're clearly a noncompliant troublemaker and not worth hiring.

Most places don't do much vetting of your background until you're hired. At which point it can be a lot of work to offer to someone else, especially if it's been more than a few days.

Keep in mind that the large employers pay Equifax and give them your pay data.

Equifax/TWN has a brilliant business model that should be illegal. Get paid to collect data, then resell it.

Is this something that HR can typically & easily control with the systems they use?

That depends on the systems they use. I appreciate the OP for making at least one office give a moment's thought to it.

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