Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

Data Brokers, Equifax, and “The Work Number”

• Several comments explain that many employers and payroll providers send salary data to Equifax’s “The Work Number,” which then sells it for income/ employment verification, including to employers, landlords, lenders, and possibly social services.
• A “freeze” is opt‑out only; data is not deleted. Opting out requires sending extensive identity and address documents, which many see as invasive and risky, especially given Equifax’s past breaches.
• People note the asymmetry: collection is frictionless, while opting out is high‑friction, suggesting the process is optimized for data exploitation, not privacy.
• Some defend strict ID checks as necessary to prevent malicious third‑party opt‑outs; others call this hypocritical since such rigor was not applied to collection.

Information Asymmetry and Wage Negotiation

• One camp argues this is just how markets work: both sides try to discover the overlap between what employers will pay and what employees will accept; public salary data and recruiters also help workers.
• Others push back hard: precise knowledge of a candidate’s past pay and financial stress greatly increases employers’ bargaining power and diminishes workers’ ability to negotiate, leading to systemic underpayment.
• There’s debate over whether “the market price” is independent of such data; critics argue that anchoring on prior salary directly lowers future offers.
• Some discuss that employees also gather data (Glassdoor, peers, AI tools), but most agree employers still hold far more and richer data.

Discrimination and Algorithmic Tools

• Commenters warn that combining detailed financial/employment data with AI enables de‑facto discrimination (age, health, pregnancy, race, religion) via proxies while maintaining plausible deniability.
• There is skepticism toward corporate claims that they “don’t use algorithmic wage‑setting tools”; people note that once such metrics appear in HR systems, they’re likely to influence decisions informally.

Legal, Ethical, and Policy Angles

• Many view employer‑driven data sharing without explicit consent as a major privacy violation and call for strong wage‑transparency laws, strict limits on such data, and heavy penalties.
• Europeans note GDPR‑style regimes would forbid much of this or at least constrain it; US commenters contrast the weaker protections and greater role of private credit bureaus.

Broader Concerns and Counter‑Moves

• Fears extend to landlords and retailers using income data to ratchet up prices and rents, converging on a world where one’s entire financial life is continuously optimized against them.
• Proposed responses include poisoning data, avoiding certain HR/payroll platforms, pushing for transparency laws, and, for some, shifting to self‑employment—though others highlight risk and survivorship bias.