<story><title>Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?</title><text>If you haven&amp;#x27;t heard of it, Pave is a YC-backed startup that helps startups with compensation. I can&amp;#x27;t actually access the system so I&amp;#x27;m speaking from hearsay and what&amp;#x27;s information on public parts of their website. The way I understand it works is that you connect Pave to your HR and Payroll systems, they take the data about who you employ and how much you pay them, combine it with all their other companies, and give companies a collective breakdown of compensation ranges.&lt;p&gt;My question is, isn&amp;#x27;t this specifically anti-competitive wage fixing? This seems exactly like RealPage but for employee compensation. As far as I know, colluding on wages like this is illegal. Is there something about the company that I&amp;#x27;m missing?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wing-_-nuts</author><text>I downloaded a personal report from the work number website and found to my horror that my employer was reporting &lt;i&gt;every. single. paystub.&lt;/i&gt; gross and net, to equifax.&lt;p&gt;That felt like a huge breach of privacy.  Given that equifax had already proven incompetent at keeping my data secure, I immediately sent HR a request to stop sending my supposedly &amp;#x27;confidential&amp;#x27; pay info.  They politely told me to kick rocks, so I went on TWN&amp;#x27;s website and froze that report so &lt;i&gt;no one&lt;/i&gt; would be able to request it, and it will be a cold day in hell before I thaw it.</text></item><item><author>atrettel</author><text>I have never heard of Pave before, but this just sounds like yet another copy of Equifax&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;The Work Number&amp;quot; [1].  Basically, HR at many companies gives your salary and employment history data to Equifax, who then sells access to the information to certain parties with supposed need to access it, including potential and current employers and creditors.  This report is likely one of the most invasive consumer files out there for many people.&lt;p&gt;I cannot comment on the legality of this kind of data sharing, but as I and others have pointed out, it has existed for a while.  I do agree that it is concerning.  You can freeze your Equifax The Work Number report at least, just like other credit reports.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theworknumber.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theworknumber.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iav</author><text>I am an investor in equifax. Let me clear up a misconception on where the data comes from. Half the data comes from large enterprise customers, who “sell” the data in exchange for Equifax doing I-9 verification for free. The other half comes from 39 payroll companies. Every single payroll company except for Rippling and Gusto sell paystub data to Euifax. (Rippling will start next year). Those are exclusive revenue share deals. You cannot be a competitive payroll provider without the revenue share from Equifax. So before you blame your employer, they might not be selling it directly and even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?</title><text>If you haven&amp;#x27;t heard of it, Pave is a YC-backed startup that helps startups with compensation. I can&amp;#x27;t actually access the system so I&amp;#x27;m speaking from hearsay and what&amp;#x27;s information on public parts of their website. The way I understand it works is that you connect Pave to your HR and Payroll systems, they take the data about who you employ and how much you pay them, combine it with all their other companies, and give companies a collective breakdown of compensation ranges.&lt;p&gt;My question is, isn&amp;#x27;t this specifically anti-competitive wage fixing? This seems exactly like RealPage but for employee compensation. As far as I know, colluding on wages like this is illegal. Is there something about the company that I&amp;#x27;m missing?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wing-_-nuts</author><text>I downloaded a personal report from the work number website and found to my horror that my employer was reporting &lt;i&gt;every. single. paystub.&lt;/i&gt; gross and net, to equifax.&lt;p&gt;That felt like a huge breach of privacy.  Given that equifax had already proven incompetent at keeping my data secure, I immediately sent HR a request to stop sending my supposedly &amp;#x27;confidential&amp;#x27; pay info.  They politely told me to kick rocks, so I went on TWN&amp;#x27;s website and froze that report so &lt;i&gt;no one&lt;/i&gt; would be able to request it, and it will be a cold day in hell before I thaw it.</text></item><item><author>atrettel</author><text>I have never heard of Pave before, but this just sounds like yet another copy of Equifax&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;The Work Number&amp;quot; [1].  Basically, HR at many companies gives your salary and employment history data to Equifax, who then sells access to the information to certain parties with supposed need to access it, including potential and current employers and creditors.  This report is likely one of the most invasive consumer files out there for many people.&lt;p&gt;I cannot comment on the legality of this kind of data sharing, but as I and others have pointed out, it has existed for a while.  I do agree that it is concerning.  You can freeze your Equifax The Work Number report at least, just like other credit reports.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theworknumber.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theworknumber.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SoftTalker</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t ever work in the public sector then. Your salary is public record, open to anyone who is curious enough to look.</text></comment>