Comment by wing-_-nuts
5 months ago
I downloaded a personal report from the work number website and found to my horror that my employer was reporting every. single. paystub. gross and net, to equifax.
That felt like a huge breach of privacy. Given that equifax had already proven incompetent at keeping my data secure, I immediately sent HR a request to stop sending my supposedly 'confidential' pay info. They politely told me to kick rocks, so I went on TWN's website and froze that report so no one would be able to request it, and it will be a cold day in hell before I thaw it.
I am an investor in equifax. Let me clear up a misconception on where the data comes from. Half the data comes from large enterprise customers, who “sell” the data in exchange for Equifax doing I-9 verification for free. The other half comes from 39 payroll companies. Every single payroll company except for Rippling and Gusto sell paystub data to Euifax. (Rippling will start next year). Those are exclusive revenue share deals. You cannot be a competitive payroll provider without the revenue share from Equifax. So before you blame your employer, they might not be selling it directly and even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway.
Do you have a sense of why, according to you Gusto will remain the only company that doesn't sell payroll data to Equifax?
Seems like something gusto can turn into a marketing point. Surely there’s a desire for a privacy respecting payroll/hr platform.
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This may not be correct. My current company uses Gusto for payroll. Pulling my data, I see everything. I am confirming with Gusto support its sourced from them.
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Gusto is still pre-revenue?
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Sounds like Gusto is the only acceptable option then. Thanks for the info!
> even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway
Surely that can't be legal?
As a Gusto admin for my company and user for another (well, my wife is the user), I am happy with our choice of payroll provider.
That's good to know. The company I work for currently uses Rippling; I will mention this upcoming change and suggest that we should consider switching to Gusto.
I hate the argument of "you cannot be a competitive company without being a scumbag."
It's a bad argument through and through.
Perhaps you would find it to be more palatable if it were phrased as: "You cannot be competitive as a company if you do not serve the wants and needs of the customer."?
But, of course, that says the same thing. These companies are scumbags because that's how the customer wants them to behave. In this case, because it makes executing payroll cheaper for the customer, which is a highly desirable trait to the customer.
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Can I opt out thru the payroll company?
No, but you can opt out at the Aggregator level. Currently, The Work Number is the largest salary aggregator, you may find this link, helpful:
https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
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Maybe I'm missing something... If the data doesn't come from the employer, then how does the "payroll" company get it?
It is indirect instead. The employer tells the payroll company: pay employee $x (and handle deductions, retirement contributes etc ...) The payroll company then has this data and can resell it. I would expect the contract the employer has with the payroll company explicitly allows for the data sharing.
You make an excellent argument here for tight regulation of the industry.
… and the usage?
Most highly-paid people have no idea how much privilege this affords them.
You wonder why so many businesses are nice to you? It’s because they’ve already looked you up and know you’ve got a high income and are a millionaire.
Write a personal check for your next automobile? Sure thing, you can drive it off the lot a few minutes later. They won’t even bother cashing the check for a week or two.
Try doing something like that as an hourly worker, even if you’ve got the money in the bank.
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Don't ever work in the public sector then. Your salary is public record, open to anyone who is curious enough to look.
I think that's widely understood and part of the job description of being a public servant. What's not widely understood is HR secretly selling your data while working at a private company.
> your data
Is it yours though? The employer could probably argue that it's theirs. Devil's advocate: I think it's widely understood that entities can be transparent with their data if they choose, other than NDA scenarios.
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Yeah I used to work for the navy. Pay was standardized under the GS pay schedule and anybody could have looked that up. I was fine with that.
In the private sector, your comp is determined by a negotiation undermined by an asymmetric information disparity. HR at a hiring company has way more information around market comp as it is without having your exact current comp when they make an offer.
What I find particularly egregious about this is that management at this company had admonished me that my comp was 'confidential' and that I shouldn't discuss it, while simultaneously selling it to equifax.
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Why would that be a widely understood part of the job description? Almost every American teacher, firefighter, planner, street engineer, health inspector, police officer, train conductor, bus driver, along with the managers, office administrative staff, janitors, and groundskeepers that support those activities are public sector employees. What do they have in common that would suggest they deserve less privacy than you do?
Most of these jobs are not special or meaningfully "public". They're just normal jobs for firms that happen to be public bodies. I don't think it's at all obvious that people are knowingly and deliberately making these tradeoffs by working there.
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Public servants do not make enough money to be useful targets. The meaningful threat comes from large compensation tied to other asset information (tying an online person to that income, not difficult). You can buy lists of these already tied up and ready to download for your scheming pleasure. From English Rolex robbers to Florida kidnappers, they all enjoy the data.
I do not think it can be stopped, but the days when a wealthy person could safely live in a suburb and have the kids imagine that they are middle class is long gone. It is terrifying. The best thing for a wealthy discrete person to do is move to Singapore or Australia, or somewhere with a sufficiently low crime rate to feel comfortable, or get quality security, which sucks.
The security minded can move to a gated community, which are all over the place and have existed for a very long time, and don't require moving to Singapore or Australia to live in one.
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The information available via the public record is not as detailed (typically annual salary)and not definitively tied to any person. The Work Number is tied to your SSN and is much more detailed than the public record (each paycheck and a breakdown of different compensation).
In the US, most municipalities will publish each employee's compensation every year. You can literally look them up by name.
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Which is fine. The problem is the imbalance of information and therefore bargaining power between workers and employers. With this information salary negotiation is like playing poker with your cards open so only thing it does is depress wages.
That's not a problem for the public sector because both sides can see it and there is no real negotiation (you still save time/money by not having to go thought the interview process to figure out your potential compensation).
or live in Sweden (where your earnings as well as your address and property, car or pet ownership are public record)
I’ve read about that. Is ipen to ANYbody? Is there a link?
Thanks
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The problem is not public salary. In EU multiple countries have it public with noe issues to anyone. I'm outside of EU and also have my data public due to owning an LLC.
The problem is identity fraud, and evil corpos like equifax plus some weird laws facilitate it way too much on a giant scale. This is what's infuriating.
22 states currently have salary history bans. You can save the trouble of jumping through Equifax's hoops if you have that protection.
Many if not most companies outsource employment verification to The Work Number. When you get a new job, a frozen report will complicate your background check.
They don't give out salary info in employment checks though. AFAIK they require your explicit permission except for government agencies who use it to verify your eligibility for benefits. I would be surprised if they are not selling aggregate salary data though
If they want my info, they can ask me. I would rather them not have this info before an offer is made.
That's normally how it goes. At least, I've always had the background check happen after an offer is signed. It's usually a separate company and they just report back whether your job titles/employment dates match your resume
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> They politely told me to kick rocks
The only way this stops is when people return the favor (on the spot, without a notice period).
Yep. Equifax got hacked a few years ago and the Government let them use ITS credit monitoring tool for those affected instead of reaching into its own pockets to pay for a third-party solution.
#sad #speakingOfMonopolies
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