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Comment by tabakd | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason this data shouldn't be public for everyone to read?

USAID collaborates in fighting for worker rights when they are in exploitation or near-slavery.

They likely have records of the people inside organisations who provide data for them. These people usually want to remain anonymous because they fear retaliation. And in many cases, we’re not just talking about being fired or legal actions as retaliation.

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.

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.

OK, you see that your peer earns 2x more than you, then what? You automatically assume that you need to be paid the same?

it's another data point in a negotiation.

Why can't you just ask your peer? "Hey peer, what is your salary?"

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!]

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.

c) just better than you at what you're both doing.

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...

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.

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.

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.

The wonderful thing about SWATing is the sinister nature if it. It is a euphemism, for the fact that the US is a police state. So much so that private citizens can manipulate it as a weapon.

There is no consequence, or even drastic change in policy, for the police in the face if this phenomenon. But if the same private citizen were to hire or manipulate a gang to carry out such an attack, everyone would be in prison for life.

> It is a euphemism, for the fact that the US is a police state

Fantastic point, agreed. My 1980s anger at the authoritarian misuse of "freedom" by Regan-nauts all wearing the same their greased helmet hair is affirmed moreso these days

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.

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).

Tom Scott video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bO8zEaSuWg

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.

Would you want a prospective employer to have access to your past tax returns when negociating salary?

The article also mentions information about employees operating in conflict zones.

Salary information is already easy to get thanks to The Work Number

Does TWN provide income data for background checks? I’d imagine that the data depends on your permissible purpose.

Hard to say. I only know the salary data ends up at less scrupulous data brokers (e.g. ones that sell directly to advertisers, though perhaps TWN does this too, idk)

A lot of jobs don't use TWN. None of the ones I've had did so.

It's not the employers themselves that use TWN directly, but the payroll companies the employers use. Perhaps in your industry or at your particular choice for jobs, the choice of payroll software does not end up aligning with TWN? _All_ of my previous salaried tech jobs do use TWN (I had to call each one, when a background check company seemingly couldn't do it themselves)

It seems most payroll companies send data to TWN [0]. Though I'd question the quality and breadth of each data feed. I also haven't looking into the percentage of US companies who use payroll software from the big providers and/or do it themselves

[0]: this comment tree at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41510103#41512326

Most of it already was, but normies don't go looking for public expenditure databases, so they assume it doesn't exist. Then DOGE comes along and pretends they're doing something new.

define "everyone" -- elected officials who are supposed to have oversight and insight into where our tax dollars are going? It's not like they're providing replicas over bittorrent.

Give it time. Centralised access managed by junior engineers pretty much guarantees the data gets stolen.

Perhaps the first foreign adversary nation state getting there will patch the security flaws after stealing the data?

A Chinese APT had unfettered access to the Treasury Department, discovered back in December. It's interesting that people are much more excited about new government employees accessing these systems as part of their duties than they are about this.

True, but the Chinese also can't order malicious tax audits against political opponents like Trump can.

Are you arguing that people are at risk because a comparison of Treasury and IRS records is going to reveal tax fraud or something? I don’t think that’s on the table. At any rate, Trump doesn’t need DOGE to do that, he can just order the IRS to do it like FDR did if that’s what he’s going to do.

A foreign adversary hacking a governmental system isn't good, but it's also kinda expected that they'll try.

That "just an advisor (but not really)" Musk and his ragtag group of junior developers get god mode access to lots of governmental systems is less expected. There are legal ways for the president to direct these departments, so when he opts for the illegal path, it's definitely noteworthy.

It isn’t illegal.

So who is the head of Department of Government Efficiency? If it's Musk, like Musk and Donald has said lots of times, why is he not confirmed by congress?

I would love it if tax returns were public (as they are in other countries), but that's not what's happening here.

Many. It's private for basic reasons, as are PII in your workplace.

Because you have a right to privacy.

Lets start with Trump and Musk.

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