> people from the US are very reluctant to talk about how much they make; unless they're in the top brackets

Yep!

Would this be related to the claim that Americans are never poor, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires? Only people at the top would have nothing to be embarrassed about, while everybody else would love to tell you how much they make once their ship has come in.

Hmm I would say that Americans may be wary of revealing their own personal salary, but that there's very open discussion of typical wages for any given kind of position in the US, and it's not considered taboo to complain about being offered a salary below your expectations.

Correction, they are publicly available for locals with (whatever you call a SSN in Norway). A non-Norwegian not living in Norway (for example, a person being offered a job to relocate there) would not be able to access that database.

That's correct, it was recently changed a little. That said, I'm not sure how that would help you anyway, given that you probably wouldn't know anyone to look up?

There are better ways to look these things up, like trade unions. There are plenty of them, and they all publish income data on a regular basis.

How did they gat that past the new privacy regulations

Your contribution to the welfare state (absolutely MASSIVE public sector) is considered public information, to ensure that everyone trusts that everyone contributes equally. Not joking.

But does this outweigh the individuals rights

It's not considered private information, I guess. There's also exceptions to gdpr for laws and regulation, so I assume they're pretty well covered, being /the government/ and all. This data is published by the tax authority.

And it isn't something new, it's been like this since post-WW2.

Just because its been this way since ww2 is not a good argument - this sounds like complacency to me.