[S4M]

In Norway, the salaries are public. I have never lived there, but a colleague who has worked in Norway told me that it was a pain, not because your neighbours know your salary, but because people can target you commercially as they know how much you can afford. But apart from that, nobody cares.

[runarb]

I live in Norway. Its not the salaries per se that is public, but how much you pay in tax. But from that you can quite accurate estimate someones salaries. Your capital assets are also public.

This is nice reading for all kinds of scammers. Thus list are actively being analysed by banks and financial institutions when soliciting potential customers, and burglars are literally driving around with thus list when looking at houses to break into.

Until two years ago thus list was publicly available on the internet, but now you have to log in at a government run portal to search them. But everyone can still search anyone.

[geon]

> burglars are literally driving around with thus list when looking at houses to break into.

That surprises me. You could just pick a random home in the right area and hit the jackpot every time.

[runarb]

That surprises me. You could just pick a random home in the right area and hit the jackpot every time.

Doing your burglaries in the right area is impotent, but for what I can gather from reading the newspapers professional burglars also looks at other things to maximize their profit.

For example in an area you can have to houses that looks the same, but one is own by a couple that is old and not that rich. They do have the money to live there, but barely so they don't spend that much. In the other house you have someone that is younger and just got rich. They will be more likely to have movable objects like jewelry, Loui Vuitton handbags and a new TV one can steal.

The local junkies are of course just breaking into random apartments, but a lot of the burglaries her is done by professorial teems. They want to know what to expect when burglarizing someone.

[_delirium]

The relatively low inequality in Norway probably reduces reasons for people to care, since a large segment of the population make very similar incomes. I live in Denmark, and among "regular" professionals there is very little friction over salary because everyone makes similar salaries— you only deviate significantly upwards if you go to things like finance or start a successful company, and you deviate downwards if you're a grocery worker and similar (but even they get a decent wage... around $40k/yr w/ full benefits is just about the minimum possible wage for someone who's employed). In the rest of the cases you make something vaguely in the vicinity of Regular Middle-Class Salary, which most people are pretty happy with.

A fully public database would be interesting for auto-targeting, though. Someone like Amazon could feed it as another factor into their pricing algorithms.

[runarb]

The relatively low inequality in Norway probably reduces reasons for people to care, since a large segment of the population make very similar incomes.

People do care a lot. When thus tax list gets published the newspapers don’t write about anything else for a week :) The data is extensively mined. Maps and list are produced an mass to show things like: * Who are the riches in your area? * Where do the poor people live? * What is the average income in your profession?

For 99% of the Norwegian population, there tax record will be the first hit on Google for their name. If you as a male goes on a date with a girl, you can be sure she has viewed your tax record. So will here parents as soon as they learn your name (there is an app for that).

When thus list didn't required a log in there also was a Facebook app that displayed the income for all your friends.