In the town where I grew up there is a "think tank" that is really a sort of watchdog group and every year they pull a Freedom of Information Act on all of the school districts in the state. Then they put all of that information in a database on the web. If you know the district or the person, you can see pretty much exactly what they make per year. If you knew my real name (which apparently some people do on here because of Twitter I think), you could look up and see what I make. I've had this conversation before and it doesn't really bug me that they do it, but the reason why they do it does.
I wonder what would happen if all information was available for everyone - especially if for publicly elected officials, all of their income has to be disclosed while they are in office.
I doubt the would ever allow that. Oddly enough, even with this somewhat transparent system that I explained, there are still other ways they try to hide things like fringe benefits that don't get reported and stuff like that.