Albanian prosecutors probe huge suspected leak of personal data

All taxable income is public in Finland as well, although the information comes with a delay of about 1 year, so you can't make out exactly how much your co-worker or neighbor makes right now.

Tax declarations are public information in e.g. Finland. You can easily find out what your neighbors or colleagues are earning. It&#x27;s not causing many issues other than people having a better negotiation position when e.g. negotiating their salary with employers or having unions do so on their behalf.<p>In Albania, the interesting thing of course is that it is quite a bit less organized as a country and that it has a lot of issues with e.g. corruption, smuggling, etc. So the declared income only tells part of the story and it&#x27;s all the off the book stuff that is really juicy and interesting. Corruption and tax dodging are highly private activities; just like other things you are not supposed to do. Only an issue if you have something to hide.<p>The right to graft, fraud, and theft are not protected by the UN declaration of human rights or most constitutions. Rather the contrary. But yet they are still widely spread in many countries. Transparency is one way to expose that.

Isn&#x27;t this the norm in places like Sweden?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;2a9274be-72aa-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;2a9274be-72aa-11e7-93ff-99f383b09...</a><p>I suspect in the future all salaries will be public.

I&#x27;m quite fortunate that I work for a company that&#x27;s very transparent about pay now, but I&#x27;ve worked at a few places in the past where sharing your salary details was considered a serious offence. Obviously the point was to maintain paying as little as possible. I occasionally wonder what would have happened if the payroll database had ever been leaked, or if there was a leak from HMRC (UK version of the IRS). I strongly suspect it would have been the end of the company as a lot of people would have walked out.<p>You&#x27;d think that risk would have been enough to equalize the wages a bit, but it definitely wasn&#x27;t the case at any of the places I experienced. I guess the existential risk is less of a threat than the cost savings are a benefit.

Actually, I don&#x27;t see a scandal in this, all income should be in the public domain. In fact it is, in various contexts: public workers salaries are public in the US, in my country tax sheets are public record, you only need to identify yourself to get them.

When your personal data is stored in company&#x2F;government databases, never consider “if” your data will be leaked, but “when”.

Many people in commenter are confusing transparency and theft.<p>Transparency is something that should be regulated by law, but this is a data leak, and it can&#x27;t be viewed positively.

In the US military, you could figure out exactly what anyone made, because it was based on a rank + tenure formula that did not have many exceptions. There was some regional stuff around housing allowances, hazard pay, etc, but that was also formula driven. The &quot;secret&quot; then, was about how to get promoted faster, and not what your pay was. Not that it&#x27;s a solution for the private sector, but it was easy to understand.

This reminds me of that time, two or so years ago, when almost everyone&#x27;s personal ID in Bulgaria was released and similar data could have been obtained for almost any adult.<p>Quite embarrassing and dangerous. Stuff like this should be a wake up call and indication of worse things to come<p>The only good thing about all this is that I&#x27;ve been looking for a site just like this for a long time. Bookmarked.

A salary is the contract between the employer and the employee, it should remain a secret unless one of the two wants to disclose it.

I heard that having this data led to the destruction of Nokia as it bred huge resentment and jealousy among employees who had joined later because of lower upside from stock.

Transparency leads to accountability

Any Albanians on here who can validate if their own salary is in the list?

&quot;...Any other use of it is a criminal act, which endangers the social order by violating the private security of every citizen,&quot;<p>I hear this in a deep and booming Orwellian voice. What specific danger does this put anyone in? I certainly can see the owners of capital being upset when their workers find out how egregious the disparity of income is, but outside of that?

Sooner or later it&#x27;s going to happen in a large country like the US as well, it&#x27;s not a matter of IF, it&#x27;s a matter of WHEN. And that&#x27;s going to be quite amusing to see unfolding.