You're Probably in a Database of 188 Million Salaries. You Never Agreed to Join It.

A single Equifax product called The Work Number holds active salary and employment records on 188 million people — sent in automatically by employers' payroll systems, with no consent step for the employee whose data it is. Lenders, landlords, and background-check firms buy access to it. So does the government: roughly half of U.S. states already use it to verify Medicaid and SNAP eligibility, and three senators are now investigating Equifax's plans around a new federal work-requirement law, after the company's CEO told investors it represented a "massive" business opportunity.