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Comment by csmatt | Hacker News Reader

I'm not judging one way or another, but is privacy not something the Swedish people are interested in?

On the whole, I'd say privacy is valued similar. It's just a small quirk. Same how Americans tolerate banks having a secret-sauce shared credit validation system with god knows what information they sell back and forth.

You can get a copy of your credit report. It isn't secret.

If you were Swedish you might not consider it private information. Being from the US I do, but I don't consider my age private. It's difficult to say where a culture should draw the line, in an objective way.

How is that a privacy concern in the US if you find the salaries of over a million people on a government website? I find that a bit disturbing.

It's certainly personal data within the meaning of the law in all the EU states.

Everyone on here has a blue fit over the NSA but is fine with this!

Government is the public sector.

So I give up my human rights when I work as a civil/crown servant?

Partially, yes. Like all employment, when you take a job you give up part of your rights. When you take a job as a public servant you give up more than you would if you took a private sector job. This includes some human rights. The most obvious one is the right to do whatever you damn well please all the time, but there's various others. As a public servant you, for one thing, lose the right to practice your religion during the time you work, which is not something you lose in the private sector (this is because the government, and thus it's employees, cannot be allowed to be anything but neutral in matters of religion).

Read the contract you signed when you took a job. I bet it'll be entertaining and instructive. Don't take anything I say, or indeed the contract you signed, as legal advice.

You do however, retain the right to terminate your employment (no matter what the contract says, and it must be free to do so, provided a certain period of notice is respected), and get back full enjoyment of your rights.

Why there is no valid reason for individual salaries to be posted.

That doesn't make sense. We aren't eating government employees.

No but you are abusing my rights

UNHCR # 12 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

As well as my rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

No valid reason exists for individual salary's to be posted just as with the blackmail scam with mugshots proves.

Given that the government already knows, and either your employer or your accountant knows, and your bank has a pretty good idea, why do you think your income is to any meaningful extent still private?

Your neighbor knows how much you make? Everyone you've listed has a need to know, that doesn't mean that everyone has a need to know.

Your doctor knows, your parents know and your insurance company probably knows, but does that mean you broadcast to the world that you have a third testicle?

Personally, I wouldn't want it shared with the world. The people/organizations you have listed are somewhat trusted entities.

Income data can be used for a slew of criminal activity. I wonder if you can correlate the release of the data with burglaries or other crimes spiking in the relatively wealthier households, compared to their neighbors.

It's a risk but it seems likely to only be a problem in places where there are significant variations in income: if you live in a neighborhood where the average house costs $500K, your hypothetical burglar is going to assume that they're all good targets – or they'll just go to the house with a Mercedes in the driveway.

You ever listen to a friend, who has recently hit a rough patch, talking about their difficulty paying their bills and think "gee, this would be a rather inappropriate time to mention how much money I make."?

That is where the desire for wage privacy comes from for me. Talking about how much you make, outside the workplace, has no benefits. It is just going to make the conversation awkward, or somebody is going to feel bad about themselves, or somebody is going to get an irritating spark of envy where none needed to exist. As far as I am concerned, you may as well publicize dick length.

(Public employees opt-in to the public knowing how much they make. The reason the public gets to know in that case is because the public is paying that salary. There is an employee/employer relationship there.)

Employees and employer form a market like any other. Societal norms around "wage privacy" sabotages this market at the cost of employees.

Exactly, the politics it causes invariably causes wages to rise. Always add 20% to whatever you are telling people.

Note my emphasis in this snippet of my comment: "Talking about how much you make, outside the workplace,..."

Discussing wages with your employers/colleagues has advantages, and without it collective bargaining is difficult to impossible. However coworkers account for a slight fraction of those that most people interact with.

There is no utility in me (someone who works in tech) telling my brother (who works in aerospace) how much I make, and vice versa.

I think public employees to the public knowing how much a particular job/role at a particular location on the salary ladder at a particular agency. But unless they share their particular role/ladder location with friends, I don't think they are opting into sharing their exact salary; only their salary range.

The people that I know who work for the federal government simply say "I'm a mathematician at NASA", not "I'm a GS-13, Step 4 mathematician and BTW, I got a bonus of X last year."

Citizens of a social democracy see this differently.

And non secret isy different from rubbing in someone's face

You can use a house or lifestyle metric to determine who is richer or poorer. A house or your lifestyle is about as public as it gets.

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