You can also request them to do likewise, with similar recourse.
A request is nothing without teeth behind it.
Most of the taboo around it is cultural, because people here attach their self-worth to their paycheck.
You could also always do it anonymously or pseudonymously. You'd have almost no chances of retaliation in that case.
That doesn't mean I'll be flying a kite in a thunderstorm, but it also doesn't mean that you should lock yourself in a bunker the moment the sky turns grey.
Most of the taboo around this is cultural, not retributive.
That there was no way to sue the company in that example is a demonstration that the employee lacked any right to break any taboo.
As such there are teeth anywhere that is at will for any request whether it is reasonable or not and whether it relates to a taboo the employee may be expected to have or not.
No funnier response to a post directly proving you wrong. L
So while, in many jurisdictions, it's fine for companies to sell data collected on their employees, and it could be argued that those employees consented to this data sharing by working there, one could also easily argue for an employee protection law that prevents companies from requiring their employees to consent to this.
Edit: it is now some time since I studied the GDPR, so I'm actually unsure if, for healt-related data, it can be used any legal basis other than consent. The reason being that health, together with a few other categories, has special protections.
They're welcome to do what they want with that, but once it includes the ability to make inferences about me as an individual, more than the company, it becomes my data. I likely have to choose to share it to meet the terms of the emploment contract, but that doesn't change the appropriate ownership.
Try and apply whatever rules you want to IP the company claims to own? Surely the exact details of some trade secret process also belongs to me and I can do whatever I want with it because I need to know it to fulfill the terms of that same contract right? I can sell it to a 3rd party just 'cause right?
Like, I haven't seen this happen, but could a recruiting team buy the compensation data on staff at a competing firm, identify those that look like a good deal, and poach them starting with a "we'll offer you k% more than your current employer"?
Could market analysts use this data to notice when a company starts firing more people, or starts giving fewer/smaller raises? What if the next time your company showed up in a Gartner or Forrester report, it came along with a caveat "however given decreased investment in staff, their pace of product development or quality of client services may be at risk."
Not "Oh hey there, you're not allowed to do that, stop that", but "We are diluting your stock by a quarter and distributing it to your workers" type shit.
I find it amusing/annoying how many Free™-market boosterism messages are actually contradictory "heads I win, tails you lose" constructs. For example:
1. "Regulations are bad, because left to its own devices the market will be optimally-efficient, once everyone has perfect-information about all the prices and deals other people are making."
2. "Regulations are bad, because cartels and collusion will be destroyed by defectors who use their freedom to make secret prices and hidden deals."
Sometimes these arguments come from the same people, but even when they don't they represent two wildly incompatible ideas of what "the free market" really is.
It's like a strawman fallacy did a fusion dance with an ad-hominem. I see it all the time on HN - surely it has a name.
No, what's disingenuous is your weird attempt to stifle an entirely on-topic discussion which has made you uncomfortable. You're suggesting that we may not criticize a stance or argument unless another Hacker News user has directly advocated for it. That's not how it works, or else we'd never be able to talk about things like the DMCA or Microsoft's forced-reboot update policy.
That said, how about we steer away from pure-meta personal attack posts to something that at least involves the original topic of markets and market-actors, starting with:
> I'm just going to make them up and pretend that an imaginary member of [group that I don't like] said them"
Your comment is saying--via sarcastic subtext--that I have "made up" items #1 and #2 and that (to substitute GP's term) "free-market ideologues" do not advance either argument about efficiency or cartel-risk.
Is that really what you believe and you'd be convinced otherwise by examples, or would you like to issue some non-sarcastic clarification?
Incorrect. I'm pointing out logical fallacies and emotional manipulation. Nothing disingenuous here, just rationality.
> attempt to stifle an entirely on-topic discussion
Incorrect. This is "flamebait....generic tangents...internet tropes." (as the guidelines say to avoid) because, as already pointed out, nobody in this thread has made these arguments together.
> You're suggesting that we may not criticize a stance or argument unless another Hacker News user has directly advocated for it.
Also incorrect. I never suggested that. Additionally, even if I had, you're not criticizing a stance - that's a dishonest and incorrect portrayal of your comment, which was fabricating an imaginary contradiction between two distinct arguments, as a means of attacking a group you didn't like.
> That's not how it works, or else we'd never be able to talk about things like the DMCA or Microsoft's forced-reboot update policy.
Also dishonest and incorrect. Microsoft is a single organization that makes public statements that you can link to and point out inconsistencies in.
That is not what you're doing - the free-market HN users that you're emotionally attacking (because that's what it is - there's no logic here) are not a single person or entity, but a highly diverse group of individuals with wildly different opinions.
What's more, you didn't even respond to a comment that one of them made - you're fabricating the existence of one of them that has a set of contradictory opinions (that you've also invented) to try to generally attack the idea that they represent. That's very bad form and very clearly against the HN guidelines.
> That said, how about we steer away from pure-meta personal attack posts
You're violating the guidelines and engaging in dishonest and anti-intellectual emotional manipulation and ideological warfare...on a site that's designed for intellectual curiosity. It's very reasonable to call that out.
> Your comment is saying..."free-market ideologues" do not advance either argument about efficiency or cartel-risk.
That is not what my comment is saying or implying - that's you fabricating a strawman.
You are "fabricating" a person because there's no specific person that you're debating with. That clearly does not mean that there don't exist people who don't hold those beliefs individually (or even together) - but you're not referring to a person in your comment, you're referring to an imaginary archetype, and you're doing so as a way of attacking it.
I've absolutely met individuals who hold either of those positions individually. And I have definitely met people that are self-inconsistent with respect to the beliefs that they hold.
Neither of those things justify you inventing a nonexistent self-contradictory person as a way to wage ideological warfare against a group/ideology you don't like.
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity."
I wouldn't say that HN commenters have been especially influential advocates in selling a potent brand of free-market capitalism to the United States of America. That happened long before HN began, and even the other advocacy efforts of people like Thiel are at this point a drop in a very large bucket.
Silicon Valley antitrust enforcement is especially topical because the government is apparently gunning for Google now, but if Realpage-like labor price collusion becomes common in the corporate world (inside or outside of SV) that's a substantially bigger deal.
Who said they were talking about HN users? AFAICR, the GP explicitly said that was not what they were talking about.
Maybe you're not arguing from bad faith; just bad reading comprehension.
Not arguing that payroll information can't be protected, my only point was that your comparison was off.
Is it yours though? The employer could probably argue that it's theirs. Devil's advocate: I think it's widely understood that entities can be transparent with their data if they choose, other than NDA scenarios.