More on Posting of All UC Salaries

In an August 8th op ed entitled “Our Next Governor Must Weigh in on State’s Right to Shield Personal Data” in the Sacramento Bee, senior editor Dan Morain reports on attempts to protect Internet privacy. Basically, the piece notes that high-tech firms take the position that the state should not get into the business of providing regulatory protection. Instead it should be left to the federal government so that there will not be 50 different regulatory schemes.

You can read the op ed at http://www.sacbee.com/2010/08/08/2943054/dan-morain-our-next-governor-must.html

Morain takes a sympathetic view of the need for privacy and notes that the California constitution has privacy protections:

“In California, privacy is a fundamental right. This state has a constitutional amendment identifying privacy as inalienable. And for better or worse, legislators don’t see themselves as potted plants. Some actually care about state law. All that means the next governor will grapple with privacy or lack of it right here in Sacramento.”

This position is rather ironic since the Sacramento Bee posts the salaries of all state employees by name, including those at UC, a potential aid to identity theft. If you have read previous posts on this blog, you know a) that LA City has begun posting salaries of its employees – but without posting individual names and b) that I questioned the Bee’s policy last October in an op ed in UCLA Today. I sent Morain an email yesterday, the text of which reads:

An interesting viewpoint in a newspaper that routinely posts the salaries of every state worker from the janitor to the governor. I had a fruitless email exchange about this with another Sac Bee editor over my op ed in UCLA Today. Time for a re-think? See
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/documents/areas/fac/hrob/bee-post.pdf

And I got back:

Thank you for your note, Mr. Mitchell. I will pass it to the person who decides about the data base.

I am waiting patiently to be surprised.