At a previous place I worked, the company was not even aware this information was being shared with Equifax. The payroll provider would share this data by default unless it was explicitly turned off.

This. It’s often ADP, Paychex, etc that is sharing the data. Did they get permission from the companies? I don’t know.

Thanks to this comment I searched for QuickBooks and Equifax. QuickBooks signed up their customers to automatically to share data with Equifax:

https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/employees-...

I just emailed Gusto to find out if they are sharing data with Equifax. I did not see a way to opt out in the employer or employee interface.

I work at a company using Gusto and Equifax did not have my data from my current employer, you should be ok.

Kudos to Gusto for not following the lead of less scrupulous payroll providers.

Gusto never responded. That is quite incriminating to me (you can't plea the 5th in the marketplace).

(sorry, dumb question) How would you find out?

You’d explicitly ask your HR department in writing, and get your Work Number report from Equifax (you can get it, right?) to make sure your employer isn’t mistakenly/maliciously sending data over despite claiming not to.

Both of those are post-hire actions, and assume that you will get an accurate response from either party.

Yeah I asked at my last place and they were basically like “too bad it’s not changing”

If you are able to resign, it will make them reconsider this decision.

I did, for various reasons including that

True, but presumably the next time you are interviewing for a job, you can ask during the interview process, and then terminate the process of they tell you they do it. Preferably after they've wasted a bunch of time and money on your interviews.

See my answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33214006

Doesn’t have to be just your employer. It could be your bank or financial institution when you request credit and they have to verify your employer and income. They bounce it off credit institutions, which capture compare and sell.

I ended up going down the rabbit hole looking into this practice and discovered companies exist advertising the ability to get any US citizens employment/compensation history for a nominal fee. An example of one such company: https://www.truework.com/

> The only way to kill this, apart from government intervention (which has no chance of happening in the US) is to let the “free market” do it by rejecting jobs that leak your information to Equifax (and letting them know why).

This will _only_ change through government intervention. The “free market” won’t solve this.

The "free market" created this

The "free market" is great at creating problems.

The free market is great at creating solutions. Something planned economy based governments are incompetent at.

Evil humans sometimes make bad solutions in a free market. Let’s stop blaming systems and start blaming humans for their corrupt & greedy behaviour.

Fighting about systems only helps corrupt politicians topple each other from place of power. Hence the funding that goes into obsession over capitalism, socialism, communism debates.

Systems not taking into account that humans can behave in a corrupt and greedy way are just bad systems. We can totally blame those systems.

That’s like saying “people” are great at creating problems. It is a true but unbalanced and unhelpful statement, since people are also great at solving problems.

Which has no bearing on whether or not the "free market" (not that such a thing actually exists) can stop it.

> Which has no bearing on whether or not the "free market" (not that such a thing actually exists) can stop it.

How does it have _no_ bearing on whether the market can stop it? If the status quo is the result of market forces, one should at least consider the possibility that market forces will not result in anything different.

I think maybe you meant to say that market forces _might_ still stop this even if they have not done it so far. That is a bit more defensible.

> apart from government intervention (which has no chance of happening in the US)

New York has already banned employers from purchasing pay history. All it takes is other states to get their act together many of which already have weaker protections regarding history.

In my opinion, banning the purchase would little, but what could be more effective is to ban the collection of it.

You won't know about it until after you've been hired though. Stopping Work Number reporting helps before being hired.

That’s even better; the cost of an employee resigning after being hired is much more than one dropping out of the hiring process. This gives you significantly more leverage should you resign or even threaten to resign as a result.