For H1B workers years of education and education is also provided. In most cases it's enough information for de-anonymization.
On the whole you may be right about making salaries public. Norway's made tax return public [1] across the board and the sky hasn't fallen in. Though to be fair in the Norwegian model you find out who has been looking at your salary info.
The counter-argument is that a system like that could allow criminals to target their victims more easily. Kidnappers could steal an SSN or other identifier to scope out victims (without a trail leading back to themselves). I also saw a scary article on HN a week ago about the guardianship industry in FL and how it targets seniors with assets to drain.
Salaries in US Congress are also public and it's not a big deal. A lot of people don't like the idea of public salaries but I am pretty sure it would be to the benefit of the employee.
Salary negotiation as an accountant should be pretty since you know exactly how much people make.
The main reason for public salaries for gov employees/law makers/etc. is that they are payed through taxes, employees of other companies (unless they do contract work for gov most of the time) are not.
Probably. My point was that a) it's not a big deal, nobody really cares and b) that public salaries are great for employees who want to negotiate. Confidential salaries are mainly a tool for employers to keep employees in the dark.
That is correct, no names, here is a sample [1]. Unless the specific individual you are querying about gives up their H1B case ID number, there is no way to be certain (unless you luck out and triangulate with physical address information, for example).
