Comment by willis936
2 days ago
You personally are cool with me personally knowing your salary and where you live? Please just post that here right now.
2 days ago
You personally are cool with me personally knowing your salary and where you live? Please just post that here right now.
That might sound incredibly foreign to you, but this is the norm in many Nordic countries, see Norway, Sweden and Finland, for a start. Tax returns for everyone are public, and so are addresses through a national registry.
Yep! In Sweden, this is part of the constitution. I think it beautifully demonstrates that the state works for the public, and that all information held by the state should by default also be accessible to members of the public, unless there is an important exception, such as personal medical privacy or national security.
It acts as a great tool for journalists, who are able to obtain meaningful insight into the actions of the state at all levels. While of course there are downsides, I think this is a very important principle.
Here you get SWATted for "fun" by kids, and targeted by Right-Wing extremists with death-threats for "political speech", and targeted by criminals based upon your vulnerability. USA is sooooo not Sweden.
Neither is really true at least for Finland.
Addresses are not public information, you can opt out from having your info public. They are not even a national registry (one exists, not public) but your telco will put you in "the phone book" if you don't opt out.
Taxes are public information but only to a degree. You can opt out from having them shared en masse (primarily to the media) but you can still inquire someone else's paid taxes from the tax office but it requires you to know their full given name, year of birth and home town.
Salary is not public information, only the total amount of paid income taxes. You can correlate them to some degree but you won't be able to know how many jobs a person has or where their capital gains are from.
Access to this information can also be limited in exceptional cases (politicians, harassment victims, identity theft etc).
Agreed.
As a foreigner who moved to Sweden, it was quite shocking first to see all this info displayed online for everyone to see but there are definitely some good sides and bad sides to it.
One of the good side is that, you can look at the people living in a given area and decided if this is the kind of neighborhood where you want to live. Lower (declared income) can have a correlation with crime so if you just want to have a quite life, you may want to select an era that has loads of working people with a higher than average income.
One bad side, some people have used it in the past to harass people, think ex-lovers and so on. There is a procedure in place where if you are afraid of being stalked you can ask for your information to be removed from these registries or at least be hidden from public view.
While true, this is currently being debated if the access of public data should be reduced [0].
[0] https://lexing.network/swedens-latest-inquiry-into-protectin...
Not just that, so are the tax returns of private businesses. You can look up any company and see exactly how it's doing.
In Finland they publish everyones salaries over a certain threshold in the newspaper every year.
In New Zealand public servants salaries were published in the “Public Service List” from 1866 through to 1988.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/zoomify/33070/page-from-the-public-...
Anecdotally they were mainly used to evaluate potential dates.
Tom Scott video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bO8zEaSuWg
Why do they need it? Besides dumb envy, why would I need someone's tax return? What's in it for me?
Salary negotiations are a very simple example, you can easily compare your salary to that of your peers and to similar positions in other companies. If your boss tells you they pay you the industry average or company average or whatnot, you wouldn't be able to check whether that's actually true otherwise. You can also have a rough ballpark of what a company pays before you apply for a job there. In general, information like this being public empowers people, whereas in most countries companies hold all the cards and use this information asymmetry to their advantage.
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Fairness and efficiency. If someone is making significantly more money than you, they are either:
a) creating more productive value than you or doing something more in demand by society [strong signal you should join them!]
or
b) manipulating their situation for better outcomes unfairly or fraudulently
In both cases it's in the interest of the greater good to have these things out in the open.
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Which works, until you have mass immigration from MENA-countries that results in a huge rise in criminality which makes everyone afraid because any criminal can look you up from the license plate or simply by searching for your name and instantly know where you are.
I hate this system. It used to be a good system when most people was law abiding and there was no gang criminals. But today? Jeez, you are like a fish just hoping not to get struck by the sharks and there is no protection available due to the failing state.
What is it called when people cry free speech, democracy, and transparency while actively assaulting these ideals?
Acting in bad faith, exploiting flaws and asymmetries in a system?
Employers almost always know the salary and location of their employees. Government workers are (in theory) employees of the citizens.
> Employers almost always know the salary and location of their employees.
Employers do, individual stockholders of the employing firm do not, generally.
> Government workers are (in theory) employees of the citizens.
No, they are in theory employees of the government, in which the citizenry are stakeholders. They are not, even in theory, direct employees of the citizens.
A US Attorney is not, in theory, your attorney just because you are a US citizen.
> Government workers are (in theory) employees of the citizens.
Not in theory nor in practice, for the same reason a teacher isn’t the employee of a student’s parents.