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Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the few things that people seem to take their privacy serious on and I don't get it, possibly because I'm too poor and trust the social fabric too much to worry about people using my tax return to scope kidnapping me.

The information is inevitably less detailed than what gets siphoned off to Credit card companies and their downstream data processors, less detailed than the ad tracking which monitors my everyday life and less than what people already share on social media. And the state already has your info!

The only thing that changes for me is that now you can't lie about your finances anymore, so no actings above your station and no acting humble while being rich. Naïve but serious question: what are the serious downsides aside from "my social circle would collapse in jealousy and rage", which sounds like a problem with the social circle?

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It's not just about kidnapping. There's all kinds of ways for this information to be abused. It can compromise employment or consulting negotiations. Affect the dynamics of relationships with your neighbours (who you don't always get as much choice about as your circle of trusted friends). Create expectations from other members of society. And it can do so in innacurate ways, eg. when a person's income and savings aren't proportional.

Claiming it doesn't matter because your privacy is already threatened from other angles doesn't help the problem. There are ways to mitigate the examples you raised (removal requests to the data clearinghouses, not participating in social media, etc).

> no actings above your station

I don't even know where to start on that comment. The premise that wealth determines some concept of "your station" is part of the problem here. I place a great deal more weight on more meaningful qualities of a person.

It would be nice if we lived in a world where nobody cared how much money you have. Until that time I respectfully prefer to keep my financial affairs none of your business.

> I don't even know where to start on that comment. The premise that wealth determines some concept of "your station" is part of the problem here.

I think you're reading things that weren't intended. My reading was that the problematic people are people who act as if they're better than others because of the amount of money they have, when in fact they're rather similar to the people they look down on. In a world where taxes are public, that's no longer possible.

Maybe you're confused because you haven't encountered such people but I assure you they exist.

No comment about the rest but for the last part, I specifically meant people who rent an expensive car and try to flaunt their "wealth" and act cocky without actually being wealth. Aside from the professional grifters ("i afforded this Ferrari by following the storage in my telegram group!!!"), there are also special types of people who try to do this as a means on itself. Rich cocky people are flaunting their wealth are also assholes but would be less affected by this.

One serious downside is when negotiating purchases like cars, houses, or anything else with some aspect of deal-making. It can go both ways. A more transparently high earner may get a much worse deal on a car than they otherwise would have, and a modest earner may be locked out of a house sale that they can afford because they got the money together but the seller feels it wouldn't be appropriate for the neighborhood.

The first one I'd call "system working as intended" ,the second one would be illegal in my country.

The system is working as intended if a rich person is discriminated against based on their wealth, but illegal if a poor person is discriminated against based on their wealth?

If you can afford a house you can afford it. You said "they don't fit into that neighborhood", you can't deny a sale at an advertised asking price for "not fitting into the neighborhood", that triggers discrimination laws.

In a negotiated setting where you can hide that motivation, everything is open, but we as a society have settled on price discrimination being okay (see, first class tickets), this simply evens the playing field so the rich can't hide their wealth. Also, if it really pains you, as a wealthy person you can easily get the poor person treatment by giving away your wealth, so I find these "both types of discrimination" rhetoris inconsistent anyway.

I'm not the person who posted this example, but functionally the person who doesn't want to sell their house to a person with less wealth could simply raise the price just as the salesperson selling a car to a rich person. As the person owns that asset, it would be quite challenging to prove because the justification could be that demand justified raising the price.

I'll agree that society has normalized some price discrimination in terms of interest rates being based on credit scores and we can debate the merits in relation to loaning someone money. And there are actually a lot of laws in place around how high an interest rate can be, who can be loaned money, etc.

However, first class tickets are not price discrimination because the offered service is in fact different which means it's not comparable to coach or business. In fact, I'm not aware of a service in which they ask you for your income statement when you walk in the door and then change the price accordingly.

Lastly, I find your rhetoric that a wealthy person should just become poor if they want equal treatment to be odd. Who classifies as wealthy? Will it be up to a judge every time? How will that change as the standard of lower, middle and upper class changes within a country?

I partially agree with the first class ticket being a bad example, but the basic idea stands, normally price discrimination just benefits the rich.

As for your last point, I'd be against fixed definitions (as you are I think), but i have seen the argument that discrimination against the rich is just as bad as discrimination against ethnicities, poor people etc., often in the context of progressive taxes, wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, discussions about billionaires.

And it's at these contexts my (flippant) rhetort flies. If you want the poor person price really badly instead of someone trying to fleece the rich guy (still mainly guys), then become poor. If you don't want to pay a high tax rate above X million income, I'm sure someone else will want to. Etc. The exact threshold is always defined by something else and will vary, and there are of course limits. But in this instance, iff the majority of people benefits from radical transparency (which I'm not 100% on, but sure enough that I'm arguing for it) by being able to negotiate wages and properly asses the financial situation of the country, as well as helping to detect tax evasion via community tipofs(controversial I know, my opinion, not universal etc.), then I'm okay with sacrificing the ability of the wealthy to get good housing deals or hide dynastic wealth. They can always give away that wealth if they want to get better deals, pay less taxes etc. something you can't do with ethnicities, upbringing etc. So discrimination based on wealth is inherently different than those other instances in my eyes and this is what this remark was about

>>Naïve but serious question: what are the serious downsides aside from "my social circle would collapse in jealousy and rage", which sounds like a problem with the social circle?

Serious downsides include:

* making it harder to keep money making opportunities secret. If you are known as the truffles guy, who spends time hiking Mt. Cayenne, and then suddenly every one knows that your income rose 20X last year, people can deduce that Mt. Cayenne has a big stash of truffles. It reduces the incentive to spend years scouring the forests looking for sites rich in truffles, and makes it more profitable to track income tax receipt rolls to find sudden surges in income among truffle foragers.

* requires that certain people in the state inspect all of your private economic interactions, and that you allow this under pain of imprisonment, so that accurate income data can be collected. This gives massive power to those who do the inspecting, and has collateral damage for things like encrypted communication, which due to its ability to aid in evading these inspections, could become restricted.

First one I don't buy (someone will still do the things worth doing because they will make some more, they will simply have more competition...I also believe in antitrust), second one...no, aside from what we do anyway? Every developed nation has a robust taxation system, this simply makes that information public.

When the profitability of creating valuable information decreases, and copying valuable information increases, people will do more of the latter and less of the former. I don't see how it wouldn't turn out like that.

With regard to the second, yes a case can be made that since countries invade privacy any way, utilizing this information like this doesn't add to the privacy invasion. Maybe. But an admittedly speculative argument could be made that it makes more people economically dependent on income taxation (like the hypothetical tax receipt roll scourers who identify and stalk successful truffle foragers), making it harder to abolish the institution. The way I see it, the less we normalize income taxation, the better.

> what are the serious downsides

I'm from (somewhat) poor country, so I can list some downsides of publicizing your high income:

- Your extended family, friends and even some acquaintances start treat you as a money bag to get loans or just asking for "help" (loan without clear repayment schedule that you should not expect to be ever repayed in full) in case they have health issues.

- You attract gold diggers. Solving financial issues by getting pregnant and marrying well of partner is still quite popular here.

- Starting from some level of wealth you may be targeted by real bandits (who often work in law enforcement).

- Some people would just treat you differently. Basically what you said by "my social circle would collapse in jealousy and rage" but also small things like "oh this guy is rich anyway, so no need to offer to buy next round of drinks after they bought one" etc.

- Recruiters are very pushy in asking your current salary and expectations. You learn to push back quite quickly, but giving them ability to easily determine your current income would be bad.

Now, can you list some upsides? (besides determining how much employer that you would like to join pays for similar positions, which is better solved by levels.fyi anyway, and without downsides listed above)

To answer the question

- unbiased Salary data, making union negotiations and expectations of new grads grounded in reality, unlike the reporting bias of levels, Glassdoor etc. This is why management hates people sharing salary info - making it easier for new founders to budget their talent costs - directly answering something you said, Making it easier to push back against recruiters (market average is this, I'm at least average, fuck you pay me) - easier time spotting tax evasion (which some might see as a downside) - exposing inequality in society in undeniable fashion, giving teeth to any arguements about them. Similarly for arguements about which data shouldn't be collected, which incentives are working or not...

The bandits/corruption thing I can't argue with, but that's a deeper and different problem than public taxes in Norway or Germany. Same for gold diggers and money bags

> unbiased Salary data, making union negotiations and expectations of new grads grounded in reality, unlike the reporting bias of levels, Glassdoor etc. This is why management hates people sharing salary info - making it easier for new founders to budget their talent costs

You can have some stats or non-PI info published on this. Or force companies to publish how much they are paying to existing employees with same title, like they starting to do in several US states. No need for nosy neighbor or potential romantic interest to have access to my income.

> Making it easier to push back against recruiters (market average is this, I'm at least average, fuck you pay me)

Or you might be below average like significant amount of people who I have interviewed and who can't reverse a string? Anyway, everyone can't get "at least average" salary, that is not how average works (note for pedants: unless everyone earns exactly the same, of course).

> easier time spotting tax evasion

What does it have to do with tax evasion? IRS already has this data. If you are worried about politicians and government employees and want visibility into their earnings (which is reasonable), you can make only their data public, which is already implemented as a law in my country. Again, no need for a random Tinder date to have this data.

> exposing inequality in society in undeniable fashion, giving teeth to any arguements about them

I won't argue with your leftist agenda, but again, you can just publish stats (e.g. senior software engineer average in location X is Y) without letting my extended family know how much I make.

> The bandits/corruption thing I can't argue with, but that's a deeper and different problem than public taxes in Norway or Germany. Same for gold diggers and money bags

Well, maybe let's not enable these people then? Especially since there are multiple other options that I presented previously.

Publishing stats would be a good start yeah.

If you can justify paying less, it's negotiation time right? This just sets the starting point.

The rest I won't address because it's a boring argument to have where you call me leftist because you disagree politically instead of discussing in good faith

You still didn't present any arguments why you need to know specifically my income and not just aggregated data (that can be arbitrary fine-grained like per-company or even per-grade per-company), which makes it very hard for me not to consider whole discussion to be primary ideologically-motivated from your side.

BTW I assume we are both not from US, so I don't understand why you are acting offended after being called leftist as a reply to explicitly leftist statement ("exposing inequality in society in undeniable fashion...").

I'm open to doing those arbitrarily fine grained stats as a workable compromise, but the ability to have journalists or citizens check for inconsistencies in tax reports or use the raw data for other research seems positive for me, as well as the ability to ask my boss why I'm being paid less than my coworker who does less than me. You might disagree whether it's worth it, but they are 2 positives already (maybe 1 if you are hard against citizen law enforcement)

The second part: it's boring because we can have a discussion about which mechanisms are beneficial for society without defaulting to political shortcuts or assuming an argument can only come from a worldview (maybe I'm a weird type of market libertarian who believes in perfect information symmetry?).

You can argue that exposing inequalities doesn't have inherent value because inequalities are good actually Yadda Yadda Yadda and we can actually exchange our views on how and why we disagree...or you can default to the label. Yes we'd be rehashing a bunch, but it would be a good faith discussion.

Edit:@Caskstrength, I can't reply to you, but I would like to highlight my first sentence in the first paragraph. Otherwise, thanks for engaging

> the ability to have journalists or citizens check for inconsistencies in tax reports

Journalists verifying tax reports of politicians seems reasonable. Jealous neighbor or vengeful ex snitching to IRS to audit me (random Joe-the-programmer)? Hell no.

> use the raw data for other research seems positive for me

Why does raw data for research needs to have PII?

> ability to ask my boss why I'm being paid less than my coworker who does less than me

No need to ask your boss, I can tell you straight up: Because you didn't negotiate for it.

> You can argue that exposing inequalities doesn't have inherent value because inequalities are good actually Yadda Yadda Yadda

No, I'm arguing that if you want to expose that those damn bourgeois make too much money for too little work, then you don't really need anything more than aggregate data, but you keep ignoring it.

The fact you think people acting above their station justifies this invasion of privacy is incredible. This is an awful system. Listen to people who are telling you why and you might learn something about humans.

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