Comment by hunter2_
5 months ago
> 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.
In a market-first values system, where we rely on the labor market to largely self-regulate given the promises that free market idealogues & corporate actors made us, colluding on wages like this should lead to scorched-earth retribution from the FTC.
Not "Oh hey there, you're not allowed to do that, stop that", but "We are diluting your stock by a quarter and distributing it to your workers" type shit.
> given the promises that free market idealogues & corporate actors made us
I find it amusing/annoying how many Free™-market boosterism messages are actually contradictory "heads I win, tails you lose" constructs. For example:
1. "Regulations are bad, because left to its own devices the market will be optimally-efficient, once everyone has perfect-information about all the prices and deals other people are making."
2. "Regulations are bad, because cartels and collusion will be destroyed by defectors who use their freedom to make secret prices and hidden deals."
Sometimes these arguments come from the same people, but even when they don't they represent two wildly incompatible ideas of what "the free market" really is.
I wonder what the name is for the fallacies committed by this comment and grandparent comment. It's this disingenuous "even though nobody in this thread has expressed these two contradictory things, I'm just going to make them up and pretend that an imaginary member of [group that I don't like] said them".
It's like a strawman fallacy did a fusion dance with an ad-hominem. I see it all the time on HN - surely it has a name.
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Does my personal health information belong to my doctor? Not according to HIPAA, at least not in a way that gives the doctor control over selling it. While my pay is currently not protected by similar regulation, it seems like the kind of protection regulation similar to HIPAA could defensibly target.
Your personal health information is information that pertains to you and you only. Your compensation is part of a contract between yourself and your employer, hence why both parties have to sign it, and why both parties have ownership over it.
Not arguing that payroll information can't be protected, my only point was that your comparison was off.
Because hospitals and clinics don't care or record the treatment they provide?
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I'm not saying it is currently the case that I own my compensation number, I'm saying it's not impossible to imagine creating regulation to make that happen.
Most companies request people not share pay information. Information asymmetry is a huge deal in negotiations.
Such a “requirement” is illegal. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...
And pot was illegal in the 70s.
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But in the US, federal labor law makes it illegal for employers to prevent employees from sharing pay information (at least for employees who are entitled to unionize).
They can request it, but can't stop you if you do.
You can also request them to do likewise, with similar recourse.
A request is nothing without teeth behind it.
Teeth like employment at-will?
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I never have but I have never been told I couldn't share pay information. Certainly I have with my accountant and financial advisor. I've also been asked when applying for a new job whether or not I've been 100% forthcoming.
Well, if we're discussing whose data it is the information about how much I pay you, even from a devi's advocate perspective, you can't do better than arguing that this data pertains to both of us. So we should share the property of that data somehow. I don't see how you could argue that that data would be solely the employer's data.
If it has my name on it, it likely belongs to me. The portion that clearly belongs to the company, are the role, the amount, and my initials (maybe an anonymying number would be better?)
They're welcome to do what they want with that, but once it includes the ability to make inferences about me as an individual, more than the company, it becomes my data. I likely have to choose to share it to meet the terms of the emploment contract, but that doesn't change the appropriate ownership.
Try and apply whatever rules you want to IP the company claims to own? Surely the exact details of some trade secret process also belongs to me and I can do whatever I want with it because I need to know it to fulfill the terms of that same contract right? I can sell it to a 3rd party just 'cause right?
If I administer a survey, collect responses, and put them into a spreadsheet, is the data in that spreadsheet not mine despite the fact that it consists of things that other people told me? I can't share it without the permission of those surveyed, assuming I didn't promise not to?
These are answered questions. If you are talking about the raw data, you have to get the respondents to agree that their answers become your property (either implicitly or explicitly, there are rules around both), or no, you do not own the data in the spreadsheet.
A key distinction is that people need employment. People don't need to fill out surveys. That's why there are many things companies aren't allowed to require of their employees, that they are allowed to require of other parties.
So while, in many jurisdictions, it's fine for companies to sell data collected on their employees, and it could be argued that those employees consented to this data sharing by working there, one could also easily argue for an employee protection law that prevents companies from requiring their employees to consent to this.
It really depends on which kind of data you're collecting. If you're collecting health related data that is linkable to the people it pertains to, the GDPR would prevent you from sharing that data with third parties without one of the admissible legal basis, the most common of which is the consent of the people whose data you collected. In the case of health data, maybe even USA laws would prevent you from sharing it.
Edit: it is now some time since I studied the GDPR, so I'm actually unsure if, for healt-related data, it can be used any legal basis other than consent. The reason being that health, together with a few other categories, has special protections.
Technically sure, but the sort of people who live that way don't get invited out anywhere.
... should companies be nervous about this also though? Is the decision for their payroll info to be visible to unknown buyers an intentional, well-considered one? Is this effectively leaking potentially strategically important info?
Like, I haven't seen this happen, but could a recruiting team buy the compensation data on staff at a competing firm, identify those that look like a good deal, and poach them starting with a "we'll offer you k% more than your current employer"?
Could market analysts use this data to notice when a company starts firing more people, or starts giving fewer/smaller raises? What if the next time your company showed up in a Gartner or Forrester report, it came along with a caveat "however given decreased investment in staff, their pace of product development or quality of client services may be at risk."
The employer requires this data to do payroll correctly. Apart from that, it sound only be used for expressly authorized purposes. But maybe that's a european GDPR-influenced way of seeing this issue.