I learned about The Work Number, it’s US-specific and where your employers input your salary data for future employers to see. I imagine most users here (and probably the general population if they knew and had the choice) wouldn’t be OK with this, and I did some searching and didn’t find any specific lists online of data collection to opt out of relating to employment, things like The Work Number. They have a page to freeze your data Employment Data Freeze | The Work Number.
Should Privacy Guides have a page or section about protecting data / information from employers?
Your employer does not create an account for you nor do they fill it in. Usually a loan officer or mortgage officer wants to verify your employment before proceeding with a loan. The employee obtains the employer code. You create an account and fill in the information. The employer validates the information you input and it is shared to those approved to access the information which in this example would be the loan/mortgage officer. This is a contracted employment verification company. This isn’t like a free to access database for future employers.
@angel Actually, I looked up The Work Number and found stories about people seeing all types of records there without awareness that they were being recorded.
Do you have any sources that say this?
Your employer does not create an account for you nor do they fill it in.
I know I someone who has used this service before on the employer side. The verifier is supposedly required to certify that they have a record of the employee’s consent to access the information.
We definitely could start doing more region-specific articles (we sort of started doing that with this one) if we wanted.
The tricky thing with this is that I have 0 experience with it myself, and very few of us on the team besides me are in the US where this applies. I looked through The Work Number and I could find no way to find any information about myself, or even whether any such info exists. Without any first-hand experience it’s difficult to write about.
Before we cover any topics like this, there are a lot of broader topics similar to this that we should cover first. It’s a separate discussion, but we don’t even have any information on credit reports for example. That’s something probably more important to most Americans.