Relevant:

https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1wssf4u/ysk_...

https://imgur.com/a/6FaQQhb (original post before being taken down by mods)

>The Work Number is an Equifax (who famously had a massive data breach a few years back) owned database with employment and pay information.

>You can create a login on theworknumber .com and pull your report. Mine is seventy four pages and had info from every company I've worked at in the last 13 years including every paycheck I had received with the exact dollar amount (both net and gross) and hours worked. It has employment start/end dates, termination reason, details about withholdings, benefit enrollment, union affiliation, etc etc etc.

>This data is sourced directly from the HR platform your employees use (ADP, Rippling, Gusto, iSolved, etc). Equifax sells your data for things like employment background checks.

>You cannot have your data removed from The Work Number. You can freeze your report (much like a credit report) but if a potential employer cannot access your frozen report that may disqualify you.

>Why YSK: If you're interviewing for a job you can be at a significant disadvantage especially for things like salary negotiations because they can literally see how much you make including your most recent paycheck. Creditors also can access these reports.

>This is the biggest privacy violation I have ever seen and almost nobody is even aware of it. Certainly none of us consented to having our employment and income data harvested and sold, especially since we get nothing in return. At a minimum, people should know about how this data can impact you.

>Edit: The Work Number is primarily for the US, but there are similar services for other countries.

I checked my data. It is either 100% wrong or misleading. Start and end dates, compensation amounts, benefits. Per the file, I've worked 4 years out of 20 in my career. As an employer I have never used them and I worry for any employer who does.

From reddit:

> In my country (Hungary) you literally get a little pink book where your boss is supposed to sign the time you spent there. You keep it until retirement, the company holds it while you work there. It's also digital now but we're one foot in 1990 and one foot in 2016.

We had something similar in Romania too. Now it's 100% digital and no more delays in informing the government. The employeer needs to notify the government before someone starts work. With the paper version you had a couple of days even weeks if I'm not mistaking.

I was hoping this would give me an exhaustive log of my work history but it has roughly 3% of my career, I froze it anyways

It would be interesting to see how they would handle a GDPR request from a EU citizen who was employed by a US company.