That's a fantastically efficient way to destroy their business. There's no way to get honest reviews of employers from employees who know their identities will be exposed whether they consent or not. Doesn't even matter if the review is after leaving that job, future employers can go nosing too.
I just went in and manually edited my display name to my previous asshole of a boss. Two can play this game. If they want to get rid of anonymous content, then let them deal with poisoned content.
Exactly how do Glassdoor expect people to give earnest reviews of their employers (which is literally the core of their business) if those people can't trust Glassdoor to not to throw them under the bus when they give honest reviews of malicious employers?
Talk about sabotaging your own business model - idiots.
This is one of the most obvious potential cases of purposeful sabatoge. They were probably bribed by other big businesses to destroy their reputation so people would stop using the site.
There's nothing businesses hate more than their workers having negotiating power, and wage transparency gives them more power than they had before. There's a reason why it's considered "rude" in the US to discuss wages with co-workers; I always make a point to discuss my wage with all of my co-workers, since it's illegal for businesses to prevent that discussion.
In most other countries, it's the norm to openly discuss your wages; unions are also more common in other countries. It's just standard toxic workplace cultures trying to prevent people from getting paid what they're worth, or god forbid, forming a union.
It seems as though nobody in this thread actually read the article. They are not revealing user names on the site. The objection here is having the real name as part of your private profile data, in case of a future data breach. It’s a real concern, but orders of magnitude less serious than what everybody is assuming.
Shame on Ars for the misleading clickbait headline.
Highly recommend at least trying to poison your data before deactivating/deleting; they have some legalese that gives them a workaround to keep things to an extent
Note: When you close your account, you will no longer have full access to salaries, reviews, or interviews. Any content you have shared will be removed from the display on the site, but we reserve the right to keep any information in a closed account in our archives that we deem necessary to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. For more information, review our Privacy & Cookie Policy.
I wanted to leave a review a while back but when they asked for my name I figured with so many data breaches it was going to get revealed at some point, it's ridiculous they did it on purpose tho
Everyone thinking this was a business blunder... People got paid a lot of money to kill this site. It served in its own small way, to give workers a bit of power in relation to employers and that was unacceptable.
This kind of thing is what has always kept me from using Blind as well.
A site used to talk shit about your current employor that has a registration process that requires you to hand out your work email, and they pinky promise not to ever provide that to anyone?
No thanks, even if they would never do it on purpose, they are one good breach away from it getting out anyway.
Glassdoor is little more than a shakedown service like Yelp or Tripadvisor. It looks superficially useful but the real purpose is to suck information out of users to monetize, and extort businesses for $$$ for review "curation".
Glass door used to be interesting, but this site is total trash now. You can’t do anything without creating an account and filling out a bunch of shit. That site is basically a dark pattern hall of fame.
They probably really crippled the long term growth of that company by making stupid short term greedy decisions that killed the user experience and scared people away.
I signed up for GD with a semi-throwaway email account - not an actual throwaway, but it’s not tied to my real identity, not used for anything but spammy sites where I didn’t want to give them my info. Every site got a made up name.
Wonder what name they’ll slap on the account when they try to farm “my” data from a broker.
Are there any good alternatives to Glassdoor? The website and app were already hot UX garbage as it is so difficult to find salaries in other countries and figure out the currency without it bugging out frequently.
By Lemmy standards I'm perversely unconcerned with my privacy. But I just updated all my glassdoor info to wildly incorrect stuff (name, location, industry, job title, etc) then deleted it. Even for me this is a bridge too far.
I didn’t input my employer, so they just pull my email domain and it says like “Project Manager at MyEmailDomain” in my profile now. What a load of horse shit.
Remember when YouTube had a use full real name policy? Arguing it would improve comment quality and would stop harassment etc. Yeah, didn't quite work out at all and thankfully they let the policy fizzle.
(Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)
Although it's common for many online users to link services at sign-up to Facebook or Gmail accounts to verify identity and streamline logins, for years, Glassdoor has notably allowed users to sign up for its service anonymously.
The EFF regularly defends Glassdoor users from being unmasked by retaliating employers.
She decided to go through with a data erasure request, which Glassdoor estimated could take up to 30 days.
In the meantime, her name remained on her profile, where it wasn't publicly available to employers but it could be used to link her to job reviews if Glassdoor introduced a bug in an update or data was ever breached, she feared.
"No one has the ability to see your user profile and the contents within it, meaning no one, including your employer, will be able to see your details," Glassdoor's employee wrote.
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