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Comment by sithadmin | Hacker News Reader

Not just by algorithm. In the US, many large employers utilize 'The Work Number' by Equifax for employment verification services, and share details about individual employees as granular as individual paycheck disbursements. This information is visible to other employers that buy in to the scheme, and obviously favors the employer in salary negotiations with a candidate.

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Data brokers are a scourge. They should be illegal, or at the very least regulated.

For example, here's an idea for one such regulation:

    If the company purchases aggregated salary data, they must publish their own salaries for at least 1 year.

Possession of the data should be illegal. It can be enforced through statutory damages, similar to the damages paid for sharing copyrighted music recordings and movies.

Just make PII copyright of the person it identifies, similar to how a "likeness" is owned by a person.

Then sue for copyright infringement.

Then all the five page long boilerplate contracts for every service you use are just going to add another clause saying that they get an irrevocable, transferable license to the data they collect. Probably without telling you because there's already a clause saying they're allowed to change the contract without notice.

Regulations can and often do supersede contract clauses.

Sure, but unless the data is given some special new kind of copyright that can't be licensed or whatever, that wouldn't. Copyright just isn't the right tool for this job.

> This information is visible to other employers that buy in to the scheme, and obviously favors the employer in salary negotiations with a candidate.

Meanwhile, it is an employee-rights win that the employer can't ask for your prior salary. Which of course they now already know.

We need strong laws that protect people from companies using data. Similar to credit-data usage for loans, companies should be limited to information on an application and in an interview when it comes to making employment decisions. They shouldn't be allowed to use social-media or past employment salary, or similar. At least not without explicit legal requirements and laws governing usage.

Right, this indirection seems to give them a "throat to choke" the next time this goes to court.

Opt out: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze

I wish I could opt out. Unfortunately, my company refuses to provide such information except through The Work Number. So, the next time I apply to rent a home, I'd be out of luck with income or employment verification.

What I call opt out they call a freeze, a la a credit freeze. Perhaps it's possible to unfreeze/thaw/opt-in when you need the service?

I think it should be illegal to be registered for this by employer without explicit consent from the employee, forcing employees to opt out.

D'oh. In my tiredness, I misread it as freezing them receiving data, but now I see it's like the other firms, where they continue to receive and store data but stop honoring requests to share it.

Not just individual paycheck disbursements -- scans of the entire paycheck, any routing and account numbers, tax withholdings, medical deductions, ....

Honestly what you describe is less likely to run afoul of antitrust law than hiring some firm who has all that data to tell you what salary to offer. At least you are looking at data and competing, not just paying some consultant to tell you and every other company to lower salaries.

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