Hacker News Reader

Comment by pimmen | Hacker News Reader

You've earned all that money, it's nothing to be ashamed of so I don't really see how that's making you more uncomfortable than everyone being able to look up your expensive sports car at the DMV.

However, if you're running for office, I would be very interested in knowing how you made all that money (even if none of it was made illegally) since you'll be regulating businesses and what not.

View on HN

> it's nothing to be ashamed

What? Am I reading this on HN? The place where people like talking how privacy matter all day and how annoying the fallacy of "if you have nothing to hide you shouldn't worry about the government/corporations spying on you" is? I'm puzzled.

What makes you think salary is a matter of privacy? In a lot of countries, many government jobs come with publicly disclosed salaries. Why do you think a job in a private sector should maintain secrecy for salaries?

Privacy applies to private data. Whether salary should be considered private data is the point of argument here. Nobody is arguing about doing away with privacy altogether. So what is your point?

My point is that what two consenting adults contracts is part of their privacy unless you're an authoritarian State.

Except most contracts in the private sector (IT, finance, etc.) are not between two consenting adults. They are usually between one consulting adult and a huge corporation, a corporation that can choose to pay a certain class of people unfairly and still survive in business. It is in the interest of such corporations to maintain this asymmetry of information where they can know your salary and all your colleagues' salary but would discourage you from knowing your colleague salary.

If you think salary being private data is the obvious assumption, then think again, maybe you have been conditioned by years of employment in the private sector to believe that salary is private data. In many cultures and in many type of jobs, it is not considered private data.

> a corporation that can choose to pay a certain class of people unfairly

You can choose not to be part of that corporation.

And how would you know you were being paid unfairly unless someone made their salary public?

That's the issue here. You could be working for a company and never know you're being grossly underpaid until Bob casually mentions his salary being 15-20k over yours despite joining at the same time.

Don't companies like Glassdoor solve this problem? You don't need to know everyone's salary as long as you know the average, median and maximum in a specific corporation in a geographical area.

I don't see how making everyone's salary public will help more than knowing the average/median etc.

many government jobs come with publicly disclosed salaries.

Knowing what public servants and politicians earn passes the most basic of public interest tests. What I earn, however, doesn't.

Fair point. I chose a poor example there. A better example would be: Engineering jobs (not the IT or software kind but licensed engineering jobs) in many European and Asian companies have publicly disclosed salaries.

Publishing a taxable income (not the source of this income) is surely not "government spying on you" because government needs those numbers anyway. You could maybe argue it's "corporations spying on you", but I think it's still far from being in the same league as tracking your mobile phone location or logging your web searches.

You can opt out of the latter, but not the former. Makes a big difference.

European-style authoritarianism seems extremely popular for some reason.

"You can do what you want as long as it's not measurably sub-optimal for the community as a whole" is the dominant attitude around here.

Or "privacy isn't hiding".

Because, opposed to other government spying, this service goes both ways; you can also see how much your politicians earn.

shame isn't the only thing. If everyone knows you deal with trading rare comic books between America and Japan, with no listed prices but a comission between private transactions which you intermediate, have no employees and do it all via a couple of low-key websites, then it is no big deal. They might assume you do a few per year or per month, but that it is hardly some huge market.

If, however, the world learns that you made $37.2 million last year doing this, then this signal might be enough for your income to drop to $0 and for you never to make another penny again.

(For example because it invites a transparent competitor who does list prices and who you can't or don't want to deal with; or invited eBay, who actually loses money entering this market with a huge splash. Or invited Christie's, the auctiom house, who had not been tracking this part of the market. etc etc.)

In capitalist countries salaries can be clear signals for turnover, which could otherwise be private.

Then, I don't know, don't give it to yourself in that way but rather re-invest in your company if it really is your turnover? Those poor business owners who are making so much money that they're attracting competition can't afford accountants?

that's not a general solution. firms with employees can also have trouble hiding the size of their divisions if everyone's salary is pubic.

this really is pretty key competitive information.

Then make the search for each individual a separate query and put a processing fee on it. That would make such a lookup scale very poorly.

why is it in the public interest to make the search possible at all?

> If, however, the world learns that you made $37.2 million last year doing this, then this signal might be enough for your income to drop to $0 and for you never to make another penny again.

Which would be a win for the consumer. Information is supposed to do this to markets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com