Comment by lifeisloving
11 hours ago
When I lived Norway, my gf at the time would look up the license plates of cars that annoyed her and could see how much debt they had on the car to make fun of them. Scandinavians are oddly very open with this type of personal info.
In Sweden I have looked up someone's phone number through the info I got from the license plate to notify the owner of a BMW M5 that their 20 years old son was often speeding down the 30km/h street close by my house where kids would cross coming from the metro or a bus stop nearby.
The owner just thanked me, and said was going to have a chat with the driver. Never saw that car speeding nearby again.
When you do this the owner of the car is notified. And there is an audit trail because you do it by sending a text to a premium number.
The debt information is there so that when the owner sells the car the buyer can check to see if they actually really do own it outright.
I don't even see salary or what your debt is as "personal information" (am Swede not in Sweden), personal information is stuff that no one else would need to know. What people earn affects not just people around you and others in the workplace but also society at large, makes a ton of sense for that stuff to be public.
Especially great that you can see what employees at competitors earn, what your peers at your workplace earn and what your boss earns. Become a hell of lot easier to ensure you're not exploited. Helps that Sweden has a really strong union-culture as well.
> I don't even see salary or what your debt is as "personal information" (am Swede not in Sweden), personal information is stuff that no one else would need to know. What people earn affects not just people around you and others in the workplace but also society at large, makes a ton of sense for that stuff to be public.
In a high trust culture I get this. But what about if you're in a low trust culture with quite some "not so orderly behavior" (if you will).
Perhaps one of the steps to a high trust culture is actually trusting people.
> In a high trust culture I get this.
Wait, aren't Sweden like literally the world leader by rapes count?
5 replies →
I think it's the opposite, the mismatch of information availability between employer and employee makes that a low trust culture, which is addressed by making that information public instead. If it was a high trust culture, employees would trust their employer pay them fairly, but they don't, hence this information deserves to be public.