Equifax is selling salary data as part of an "employment verification solution":
You can view a copy of your report here:
https://employees.theworknumber.com/
It will contain:
* Previous annual salary
* Previous paycheck amounts
* Previous addresses
* Who has accessed the report in the past 24 months
From their website, this data may be able to be removed via CCPA:
> Employee data is exempt from the CCPA until January 1, 2022.
https://employees.theworknumber.com/california-consumer-priv...
That being said, it doesn't stop employers from continuing to hand Equifax your data on a gold platter, and therefore does nothing to protect you from the inevitable data breach that will result in Equifax being required to give everyone affected $0.36 or one year of free credit monitoring.
The Equifax CCPA request process on the other hand is very smooth and automated. Though doesn't seem like it's including Work Number information: https://myprivacy.equifax.com/
[1] It's a side-project of mine
[2] https://www.simplepdf.eu/editor?open=https://assets.equifax....
I don't get it. how is "PDF shows the name of the employee that created it and that they used Word 2010" relevant to the claim that "extra friction is probably a feature"?
I faxed them 4 times in 6 months to verify my identity because they have me confused with someone else and eventually just gave up.
They said any other alternative was not supported.
There are good parts in GDPR for sure.
edit: and a past employer that used this system
Birthdays are extremely easy to get (public record), and I seem to recall a specific large organization leaking a bunch of SSN's not too long ago.......
You don't need a data leak to get someone's SSN.
Also, malicious actors are almost never targeting you specifically. It is enough for them to
1) choose a birthdate
2) generate all SSNs associated with that birthdate
3) get all employment/salary histories accessible with that info.
4) scan the list for interesting tagets
5) ...
6) profit
Disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of YourDigitalRights.org.
Question / suggestion -- Have you considered monetizing by allowing lawyers specializing in CCPA / consumer privacy issues to advertise on your site?
Everyone is up in arms about Facebook and Google collecting our information... meanwhile credit bureaus are sitting in the shadows giggling to themselves
Also, you might give your bank employment details, and your bank will most likely send that info to a credit agency as well.
There's not much of an escape.
According to Peter Thiel “If you’re a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system...” https://theintercept.com/2016/10/31/trump-fan-peter-thiel-sa... So never-mind the non-millionaires.
However it is really nice to see efforts by some regular people out there setting up services such as https://yourdigitalrights.org which is the service I just used to request my information from Equifax. It will be interesting to see what comes of it. I suppose if they do not respond in 45 days I'll file a complaint with the CA Attorney General to put yet another ping regarding Equifax on their radar. https://oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-busine...
This shows that ultimately it is the regular people who drive progress, while the powerful and the wealthy just take credit for it.
Ultimately United States will transition to European-style privacy laws when it comes to private information like income and these credit agencies will be abolished, but the way to get there is for the regular non-millionaire people to exercise whatever "rights" they kinda have to ultimately get these annoyances shut down.
If you're in the process of buying a house, you might want to hold off on this freeze until your mortgage has been approved. Might be true if you re refinancing or buying some else that requires a significant loan.
I'm not entirely sure if what I've stated above is true, but I've had to use theworknumber in the past when going through the mortgage process.
A confounding factor is that as a hiring manager, and at least for all the hiring decisions I have been involved in, I know we did not use this to check candidates. So what's the upside?
EDIT: ADP Workforcenow appears to do this automatically. I'm curious to find out if anyone in our company even knows it is happening. I will find out soon enough, as this is definitely a hill to die on.
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
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It's there for me too, and I don't recall opt in permission on this.
[races off to something much worse than you imagined with your data]
In hindsight I wouldn't be surprised if their department used this tool to check my current cash income and automatically generated an offer. I wouldn't trust this data for much, and I can almost guarantee that someone in HR/Finance thinks their clever for using it.
Glad to know they chose a product that involuntarily sold out my HR information.
All of my pay from Intel, Google, Facebook is in here. Qualcomm apparently did not report.
Also, Google (my latest employer) pulled the data just before I started working, after giving me an offer. My credit card company pulls the data every month, sometimes 2-3 times per month. Several mortgage originators have also pulled the data even though I have not gotten a mortgage (I probably filled out a form on their website).
I guess I'm okay with credit card companies monitoring this, but I'm not sure I am okay with potential employers having access to this. Is it even legal in California for them to read this information? Maybe it was legal at the time but not any more?
I'm not. If they want to know, they can ask me for a paystub.
Would be nice if some journalist(s) made a big stink out of Google finding a loophole in this employee protection law.
Disc: Googler.
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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.
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.
Read the fine print next time you attach a paystub to a loan application. They are likely selling your data to aggregators.
Ergo, as employees... Share your salaries.
Knowledge is power and if the only entities that have power from knowing salaries are your employers then you have no power.
And for people hiring, make hiring decisions that are defensible, equal, and would survive full transparency. Act as if every employee is already sharing salary info, for if they aren't today they will be soon.
If people figured out a way to get this same information for their colleagues to use for salary negotiation, companies would likely stop contributing the data.
https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-artic...
"No data is shared unless your employees specifically request it to be shared, usually as part of an application process for loans, credit, or public aid, or in response to a permissible purpose under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”), such as a court order."
That somewhat mitigates the concerns of data being lost in another Equifax data breach assuming that Equifax only fulfills requests from verifiers that have received my express consent, and assuming that consent doesn't become mandatory for employment (which is the subject of the larger discussion on this thread).
Key words there are credentialed and permissible purpose.
In other words, it's an automated way for me as an employee to have my employer verify my employment and/or salary information—not necessarily both—without having to hunt down someone in HR. This is particularly useful for previous companies where I no longer have access to internal systems.
I have used it most commonly for mortgage applications.
I can log in and generate a one-time or limited-use code to provide access, and select which data I want to provide access to. I then provide that key to the third party, who verifies with Equifax.
Others have wrote this in the thread, but anecdotally I once tried to push up what I considered a low ball offer, and lied about my current comp. HR quickly said - no, thats not your current comp
I'm pretty sure they didn't reach out to my current company to ask, so the only other option was abusing a system like this
The same goes for credit data; you (largely) can't run a credit check on me without my permission.
This is an HR service to ease the burden of legitimate requests for employment or salary data that you, as an employee, request.
More logically, employers wouldn't want other companies to be able to access their payroll information for competitive reasons.
I can't explain your previous experience; perhaps you were at a company with firm pay bands, and they knew you were already at the top of your current one?
When I worked for UPS they specifically told me there was absolutely no way that HR would verify salary/employment over the phone for mortgage applications and the only way to do it was via theworknumber.com. UPS has ~500,000 employees so you can understand why they'd want to offload this work to a third party. I was working with a smaller mortgage company so they grumbled about having to do it this non-traditional way but it all worked out in the end.