9 ms·

Privacy is trendy, but imagine if everyone had access to salary data. You find your coworker makes more money, you ask for more. Or if all medical data was pu

Privacy is trendy, but imagine if everyone had access to salary data. You find your coworker makes more money, you ask for more. Or if all medical data was public, we'd have a medical revolution in understanding. Or if your Facebook likes were public, other competing websites could generate a network easier. Sure there are downsides to open information, but I can't help to think that privacy benefits the few, openess benefits the masses. (Obligatory- doesn't apply to keys or whistleblowers, but I imagine they should be taking far greater precautions than using Apple who continuously bends to China and the US government)

marcinzm 5y ago
>Or if all medical data was public, we'd have a medical revolution in understanding. US medical billing data (which include who, where, what, why and when) is fairly easy to access (ie: 100+ million patients anonymized) and hasn't helped patients much from what I can tell. And many many companies have tried. >Or if your Facebook likes were public, other competing websites could generate a network easier. And oppressive governments can hunt down dissidents, hate groups can hunt down minorities, parents can disown their gay kids earlier, etc. Once you add up all the groups that make up "the few" you get rather a lot of people.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  It’s probably not good enough to guess patient outcomes. It’s not like you could look up a surgeon and find how often the patient has a problem and then correct that against the risk pool of the patients
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    I mean you literally can. Billing data included the doctor, the procedures performed, the diagnosis given, patient demographics (age, gender, zip code, etc.). Plus a whole bunch more. Very well structured data actually although there's biases in it. My last company literally did what you said using the data. Not enough money in it so it all goes nowhere and all the big players in the space don't really care. edit: You also have full medical billing history for each patient in the data set so you can build a historical risk profiles for patients.
    - rdtwo 5y ago
      That sounds like it would be a trivial to de-anonymize. Also I’d be curious how good medical experts actually think the data is. In my field i find that data that looks legit is often actually bad enough to the point of near uselessness because the incentives aren’t aligned with collecting accurate data
      - marcinzm 5y ago
        The incentives are with collecting data that insurance companies will not reject your payments over. If an insurance company noticed you're mis-billing then you lose money. They may request full medical records of patients to verify. Which incentives generally clean data although there are biases such as up billing and spurious diagnosis to get medication covered. Medical records themselves are a mess often but billing data is better since a lot of money is on the line. >That sounds like it would be a trivial to de-anonymize. In theory yes if you joined to other identified data sets but in practice doing so makes it a massive HIPAA violation with very large government enforce penalties. There's also enough contractual sanity checking and costs that no one who gets access would bother.
      - marcinzm 5y ago
        I'd like to add that anonymized billing data has helped a lot of companies make a lot money. That however is separate from helping patients. Helping pharma companies better market medications to doctors makes a lot of money but is arguably a negative for patients.
Faaak 5y ago
> Or if all medical data was public, we'd have a medical revolution in understanding. No, your insurance premium would go up. That's it
- misja111 5y ago
  Why? It could also go down.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Because there's no incentive for them to reduce prices.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      There are many competing managed care organizations (health insurers). Healthcare cost increases slowed down after ACA: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/more-evidence-of-post-aca-slowdown-in-health-care-spending https://www.cbpp.org/blog/more-evidence-of-post-aca-slowdown... https://www.npr.org/2019/12/23/790687286/examining-health-care-spending-since-obamacare https://www.npr.org/2019/12/23/790687286/examining-health-ca...
      - nerdponx 5y ago
        I believe the research, but I doubt the ACA slowed down increases due to competition. The studies you linked don't show evidence of it either. Most people do not get to shop for insurance. Individual market plans are all similarly and eye-wateringly expensive (last I checked). And people getting health coverage through work are lucky if they have even two insurers to choose between. Therefore I don't see any reason why insurance companies would uniformly lower their "baseline" premiums when given access to more information. If they were all competing for your business like car insurance, homeowner insurance, etc. things would be very different.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
kaibee 5y ago
> Privacy is trendy, but imagine if everyone had access to salary data. Already true in Norway. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
- semi-extrinsic 5y ago
  Less true now than it used to be, they implemented a limitation after that article was published. Nowadays, if you try to check someone's salary, there is a big box on the website saying "The person you want to check the salary of will be notified that you checked. Do you want to proceed?" where I believe most people go "Nope, cancel that."
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    Or you just find someone as a proxy and run all of your queries through them. Like, my grandma in the other end of the country. The other party can't do anything with this information.
dabbledash 5y ago
Privacy benefits the few, openness benefits the masses = openness allows the masses to ferret out and punish deviance.
- waterheater 5y ago
  Actually, privacy benefits the minority. This distinction is critical to remember.
  - dabbledash 5y ago
    Exactly. “Benefits the few” is just a negative / populist spin on “protects minorities.”
semi-extrinsic 5y ago
At a place where I used to work, we noticed that the new project management and time tracking software, that had been rolled out to much fanfare, would let you check the salary of anyone in the company simply by editing the URL in the browser and reading the XML file it sent back. I've never seen IT fix anything that quickly.
analyst74 5y ago
In a utopian world where everything is public, I can see how transparency can benefit the masses. However, realistically, the powerful will fight tooth and nail to retain secrecy, and those who open up first become vulnerable due to informational disadvantage.
- enriquto 5y ago
  So, let's start by publishing the salaries of the rich, and then work down from that ;)
trident5000 5y ago
"imagine if everyone had access to salary data..." This is exactly why employers dont want this.
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> You find your coworker makes more money, you ask for more. I used to believe this when I was younger. Many, many years ago I used to work for research team a state university. In most states all public employee salaries are public data and there are watch dog groups that collect this and post it online. Right now if you have a friend (or enemy) working at a state university you can probably find their salary. While working there, there was an IT/tech staff that was pretty incompetent who most people gave a really hard time. This person didn't have much formal education and didn't understand anything about their role, but I and some others always felt that "hey, they get paid next to nothing so don't give them such a hard time." Then someone looked up their salary and found they made more than most of the junior faculty in that department. The result wasn't a wide spread demand for more equitable pay, but universal anger that this kind but lazy employee was making more than the majority of the department. As much as I hated it, I myself immediately lost all pity I had for this person. End result was that nobody got paid more, and if we could have voted we probably would have argued that this person should have either been fired or paid less. Even if in theory workers should stick together, and even in an academic dept where most people understand this theory, we're still trained to turn against each other. In my experience the best way to share salary data is anonymously. https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ radically changed my salary requirements, and it's incredible how many young people working in tech have no clue how much they could be asking for. Whenever I end up mentoring a junior tech worker I always make sure they understand how tech compensation works and what the upper bound really is. Most react at first with anger that they get paid little, but nearly all negotiate much harder when applying for their next job. Information is essential to increasing worker pay, but personal information can only result in pettiness and strife in my experience.
- enriquto 5y ago
  > we probably would have argued that this person should have either been fired or paid less. Does not sound like a healthy conclusion to me. Actually, a pretty shitty one. Not only they were bullied by most of their work colleagues, but they would conspire to lower their salary. The problem is not that salaries are public but that your work environment was really toxic. I hope they found a better place.
mosburger 5y ago
At my current employer, everyone's salaries (and the number of options they've been awarded) are in a Google spreadsheet that's viewable by everyone in the company. It's actually kinda cool to have such transparency and has forced standardization of things, and I have to imagine it has reduced biases and made things fairer.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  Every company I've seen that has one of those pays jokingly low salaries compared to competitive companies. Rather than it being used as a tool to ensure fairness, it seems more used as a shield against negotiation. "We can't pay you <competitive salary>, that'd be $50k more than someone more senior than you! You wouldn't want to be unfairly paid more than your colleague, would you!?"
  - kasey_junk 5y ago
    I worked at a hedge fund that had open salary data available to everyone and paid comparably to the hedge funds/prop desks I worked at that didn’t.

marcinzm 5y ago

>Or if all medical data was public, we'd have a medical revolution in understanding. US medical billing data (which include who, where, what, why and when) is fairly easy to access (ie: 100+ million patients anonymized) and hasn't helped patients much from what I can tell. And many many companies have tried. >Or if your Facebook likes were public, other competing websites could generate a network easier. And oppressive governments can hunt down dissidents, hate groups can hunt down minorities, parents can disown their gay kids earlier, etc. Once you add up all the groups that make up "the few" you get rather a lot of people.

rdtwo 5y ago
It’s probably not good enough to guess patient outcomes. It’s not like you could look up a surgeon and find how often the patient has a problem and then correct that against the risk pool of the patients
- marcinzm 5y ago
  I mean you literally can. Billing data included the doctor, the procedures performed, the diagnosis given, patient demographics (age, gender, zip code, etc.). Plus a whole bunch more. Very well structured data actually although there's biases in it. My last company literally did what you said using the data. Not enough money in it so it all goes nowhere and all the big players in the space don't really care. edit: You also have full medical billing history for each patient in the data set so you can build a historical risk profiles for patients.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    That sounds like it would be a trivial to de-anonymize. Also I’d be curious how good medical experts actually think the data is. In my field i find that data that looks legit is often actually bad enough to the point of near uselessness because the incentives aren’t aligned with collecting accurate data
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      The incentives are with collecting data that insurance companies will not reject your payments over. If an insurance company noticed you're mis-billing then you lose money. They may request full medical records of patients to verify. Which incentives generally clean data although there are biases such as up billing and spurious diagnosis to get medication covered. Medical records themselves are a mess often but billing data is better since a lot of money is on the line. >That sounds like it would be a trivial to de-anonymize. In theory yes if you joined to other identified data sets but in practice doing so makes it a massive HIPAA violation with very large government enforce penalties. There's also enough contractual sanity checking and costs that no one who gets access would bother.
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      I'd like to add that anonymized billing data has helped a lot of companies make a lot money. That however is separate from helping patients. Helping pharma companies better market medications to doctors makes a lot of money but is arguably a negative for patients.

Faaak 5y ago

> Or if all medical data was public, we'd have a medical revolution in understanding. No, your insurance premium would go up. That's it

misja111 5y ago
Why? It could also go down.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Because there's no incentive for them to reduce prices.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    There are many competing managed care organizations (health insurers). Healthcare cost increases slowed down after ACA: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/more-evidence-of-post-aca-slowdown-in-health-care-spending https://www.cbpp.org/blog/more-evidence-of-post-aca-slowdown... https://www.npr.org/2019/12/23/790687286/examining-health-care-spending-since-obamacare https://www.npr.org/2019/12/23/790687286/examining-health-ca...
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      I believe the research, but I doubt the ACA slowed down increases due to competition. The studies you linked don't show evidence of it either. Most people do not get to shop for insurance. Individual market plans are all similarly and eye-wateringly expensive (last I checked). And people getting health coverage through work are lucky if they have even two insurers to choose between. Therefore I don't see any reason why insurance companies would uniformly lower their "baseline" premiums when given access to more information. If they were all competing for your business like car insurance, homeowner insurance, etc. things would be very different.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago

kaibee 5y ago

> Privacy is trendy, but imagine if everyone had access to salary data. Already true in Norway. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239

semi-extrinsic 5y ago
Less true now than it used to be, they implemented a limitation after that article was published. Nowadays, if you try to check someone's salary, there is a big box on the website saying "The person you want to check the salary of will be notified that you checked. Do you want to proceed?" where I believe most people go "Nope, cancel that."
- gostsamo 5y ago
  Or you just find someone as a proxy and run all of your queries through them. Like, my grandma in the other end of the country. The other party can't do anything with this information.

dabbledash 5y ago

Privacy benefits the few, openness benefits the masses = openness allows the masses to ferret out and punish deviance.

waterheater 5y ago
Actually, privacy benefits the minority. This distinction is critical to remember.
- dabbledash 5y ago
  Exactly. “Benefits the few” is just a negative / populist spin on “protects minorities.”

semi-extrinsic 5y ago

At a place where I used to work, we noticed that the new project management and time tracking software, that had been rolled out to much fanfare, would let you check the salary of anyone in the company simply by editing the URL in the browser and reading the XML file it sent back. I've never seen IT fix anything that quickly.

analyst74 5y ago

In a utopian world where everything is public, I can see how transparency can benefit the masses. However, realistically, the powerful will fight tooth and nail to retain secrecy, and those who open up first become vulnerable due to informational disadvantage.

enriquto 5y ago
So, let's start by publishing the salaries of the rich, and then work down from that ;)

trident5000 5y ago

"imagine if everyone had access to salary data..." This is exactly why employers dont want this.

baron_harkonnen 5y ago

> You find your coworker makes more money, you ask for more. I used to believe this when I was younger. Many, many years ago I used to work for research team a state university. In most states all public employee salaries are public data and there are watch dog groups that collect this and post it online. Right now if you have a friend (or enemy) working at a state university you can probably find their salary. While working there, there was an IT/tech staff that was pretty incompetent who most people gave a really hard time. This person didn't have much formal education and didn't understand anything about their role, but I and some others always felt that "hey, they get paid next to nothing so don't give them such a hard time." Then someone looked up their salary and found they made more than most of the junior faculty in that department. The result wasn't a wide spread demand for more equitable pay, but universal anger that this kind but lazy employee was making more than the majority of the department. As much as I hated it, I myself immediately lost all pity I had for this person. End result was that nobody got paid more, and if we could have voted we probably would have argued that this person should have either been fired or paid less. Even if in theory workers should stick together, and even in an academic dept where most people understand this theory, we're still trained to turn against each other. In my experience the best way to share salary data is anonymously. https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ radically changed my salary requirements, and it's incredible how many young people working in tech have no clue how much they could be asking for. Whenever I end up mentoring a junior tech worker I always make sure they understand how tech compensation works and what the upper bound really is. Most react at first with anger that they get paid little, but nearly all negotiate much harder when applying for their next job. Information is essential to increasing worker pay, but personal information can only result in pettiness and strife in my experience.

enriquto 5y ago
> we probably would have argued that this person should have either been fired or paid less. Does not sound like a healthy conclusion to me. Actually, a pretty shitty one. Not only they were bullied by most of their work colleagues, but they would conspire to lower their salary. The problem is not that salaries are public but that your work environment was really toxic. I hope they found a better place.

mosburger 5y ago

At my current employer, everyone's salaries (and the number of options they've been awarded) are in a Google spreadsheet that's viewable by everyone in the company. It's actually kinda cool to have such transparency and has forced standardization of things, and I have to imagine it has reduced biases and made things fairer.

seattle_spring 5y ago
Every company I've seen that has one of those pays jokingly low salaries compared to competitive companies. Rather than it being used as a tool to ensure fairness, it seems more used as a shield against negotiation. "We can't pay you <competitive salary>, that'd be $50k more than someone more senior than you! You wouldn't want to be unfairly paid more than your colleague, would you!?"
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  I worked at a hedge fund that had open salary data available to everyone and paid comparably to the hedge funds/prop desks I worked at that didn’t.