Your Desperation Has a Price: Inside 'Surveillance Wages'

Companies are increasingly using AI-powered tools to analyze your financial vulnerability—from payday loan history to credit card balances—to determine the minimum salary you'll accept, a practice called 'surveillance wages.' For developers accustomed to negotiating with market data and competing offers, this represents a fundamental shift: employers may have already assessed your entire financial profile before making an offer. With only Colorado moving to legislate against this practice, workers face an unregulated frontier where algorithmic wage suppression is becoming the norm.