Comment by sokoloff

The law (paraphrased for brevity): It’s illegal to use salary history of an applicant to inform the hiring decision or salary offer of an applicant.

Whether there’s any value to the data depends on whether the “applicant” is the same human under the law. If I’m using the data to understand the market curve for a position, and to use that curve to inform my offer to all applicants, I’d wager that’s okay under the law, even if any specific applicant’s data is among the thousands of data points that went into that curve.

Let’s assume a good faith effort here, rather than a company trying to use tortured logic “we’re just trying to understand the salary curve for an SWE with SSN xxx-xx-xxxx”, that they’re trying to understand their local market and that specific SWE is 1 of 50,000 in the dataset and then happens to apply. I think that’s okay (both legally and morally).