[notefxpartner]

Posting from throwaway.

In my previous role at a large payroll provider, Equifax and few other players in the space over last two years were extremely interested in getting access to SMB payroll data, as it was the most economical way at scale to verify income for half of US labor force employed by SMBs.

Equifax was by far the most aggressive in both offering very generous compensation for that data and insistence as part of the deal on an opt out mechanism.

[neil_s]

As in, they were insisting that employers have to opt out of the data sharing instead of opt in?

[notefxpartner]

Yes. During initial meetings Equifax cited that their ADP deal has single digit opt out rate.

[t0mas88]

Doesn't the employee have anything to say in this?

The employers software vendor Intuit steals the data and sells it to Equifax for their own profit. The employer gets nothing, but could decide to opt-out. The employee who's privacy is being grossly violated gets nothing and cannot even opt-out of sharing the data?

GDPR doesn't sound like such a bad idea now...

[notefxpartner]

So Equifax has a separate brand for this: TheWorkNumber. Technically each employee can opt out here: https://theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze In practice nobody knows that opt out exists.

To be fair employees do get ~some~ value out of this, in form of of less paperwork verifying their employment during mortgage and rental applications. It's a different question whether it's valuable enough with all privacy downsides.

[jkaplowitz]

That isn't an opt out on data collection, is it? Like, the data freeze only stops people from accessing the data, but doesn't stop Equifax from adding data newly received from employers to the file? And then any data breach they have includes that new data.

What's more, any time you remove the freeze to allow someone to verify the data, you have to remember to put it back again if you want it to remain otherwise private, instead of lifting it temporarily for hours or a day or one inquiry or one verifier.

[lotsofpulp]

> The employee who's privacy is being grossly violated gets nothing and cannot even opt-out of sharing the data?

Government employees’ pay information is public information, and they seem to function fine in the world. I like Norway’s public tax record system, price transparency would certainly help the vast majority of participants in the labor market.

Only Equifax having access and selling info to other large organizations is the worst of all worlds, though.