Getting an apartment is pretty universally regarded as a terrible experience. Also, it’s only getting worse. I know, isn’t modern living fun?

One of the ways that apartment renting is getting more miserable is thanks to services like ApproveShield and its tool Argyle. Advertised as a way to screen tenants, what the service actually does is require you to login to your employer’s HR services, then begins to scrape all the information it can from it.

According to 404 Media, this information can include months upon months of pay stubs. One person interviewed for the piece says that a renter only required 60 days of payment history for their apartment. Despite this, ApproveShield downloaded “every pay stub plus all W-4s back to 2024.”

This is more than just an invasion of privacy — it also might be, as author Joseph Cox notes, illegal. Employees do not generally have the authority to share their corporate login credentials, and people have gone to prison in the past for doing so.

So, not only are they going to steal all your information and still deny you from getting an apartment, but they’ll also make you do something illegal in order to do so.

Of course, you can always opt-out — and not have anywhere to live. See? You have the freedom to choose! Isn’t that nice?