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Comment by bradlys | Hacker News Reader

Can confirm it is 100% correct. Employed in Washington and California. All numbers were correct for the ones I cared about - more or less. They missed three jobs and the dates were fucked up for a few - but is pretty upsetting. Definitely should be illegal.

They even had pay period dates and everything for my current job. Including dates I was doing 401k. Like - what the fuck - why is my employer selling that information? It's a big tech company, of course. You could even see when my RSUs were vesting. The hell!

Funny enough - the only ones who have been looking at my data are Credit Karma. Maybe I should delete my account with them - lol. I use them for taxes because they are free.

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"It's 100% correct, except for the errors"

Yeah - true. I could’ve corrected it to say - “100% correct about the shit I care about” but I figured someone would get a laugh out of someone replying with this kind of comment. Enjoy your upvotes.

I now better understand how Credit Karma can offer a free product.

Credit Karma's business model isn't somehow secret, they are very much upfront about it - https://support.creditkarma.com/s/article/Is-Credit-Karma-re...

They display ads for credit cards and other financial products on their site. They use your personal information to target specific financial products to you. Your credit karma ads are personalized.

I just wish I got better credit card offers from them; I haven't found any product they've advertised to be particularly enticing.

Yeah. That much I knew. So I’m not super peeved about it. More worried about what they’ll do with the info and if they’ll broker it out more. Didn’t think they’d get this level of info though tbh.

Oh - and their targeted ads are not very good… it’s kinda sad.

They don't share or resell anything. It's in the link I provided.

I'm sure their credit card partners request some protects to only be advertised to people in a certain income range, so it makes sense. They probably also use your income to populate the "your odds of approval" portion on their ads.

>their targeted ads are not very good… it’s kinda sad.

I think this is because they are advertising to the "everyman" who isn't very familiar with financial products.

Employers are outsourcing what should be an internal HR function of employment verification. Except in specific cases regarding government contractors, there is no legal requirement for employers to provide this data to a third party like TWN.

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