Information as a two-way street; your employer provides it so that they can, in turn, get salary reports that they can use.

I worked in this industry briefly; it's likely your HR department is providing tons of information to these services and then using the resulting statistics.

Your employer in many cases. See https://www.fastcompany.com/40485634/equifax-salary-data-and...

You yourself provide this info voluntarily to a bank when applying for a loan. The same bank verifies it by asking your paystubs before giving you a loan.

As a rule of thunb - anything you provide to a bank for credit will be reported to credit bureau and they will sell all your personal info to the highest bidder. Or get it stolen by hackers in yet another data breach

> You yourself provide this info voluntarily to a bank when apply for a loan. The same bank verifies it by asking your paystubs before giving you a loan.

This is really harmful phrasing - blaming the individual.

> when apply for a loan

This seems like general population data, nothing specific to people who’ve taken loans.

I was not trying to blame the individual, sorry if it appeared that way.

Mostly it is the unique messed up american system of credit information exchange where consumers have no control over how their data gets collected/used/sold.

I have never signed up an agreement with Equifax to store my personal data only to get it stolen occasionally. I wish US adopted more european centric models for personal data.

Do you know where I can buy this information? It might be interesting to know how much to expect from various companies. Or do they only sell to employers?

Replying to myself, there's a front page story about it now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753

Many employers send their entire workforce's annual salary as a standard data integration field for benefit/workforce system vendors. Equifax/TWN is one of those vendors many employers use.

TWN, in turn, grants these employers aggregate salary range data across companies (helping the company negotiate better deals).

I've began to answer, at least to myself, the question of "how is this legal?" with: it makes rich people a lot of money.

> You employer(I dont think so)

Yes, the employer. They give data and they get access to data.

Some of the companies selling this data are the ones who actually process the payroll for employers, and their contract with your employer specifically allows it.