Glassdoor, the roles web site acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion in 2018, permits workers to go away nameless, sincere evaluations about their employers — and had a historical past of defending its customers towards authorized pressures from firms.
However a brand new report discovered that Glassdoor has been including actual names to person profiles with out consent, per Ars Technica.
The saga started when Monica, a Midwest-based software program skilled who didn’t disclose her final title, wrote a March 12 weblog put up saying they joined Glassdoor 10 years in the past and have contributed evaluations. However earlier this month, after emailing help to request assist eradicating info from their account, their actual title was added to their profile.
Monica claims the help group took their actual title from the e-mail request.
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“Glassdoor now requires your actual title and can add it to older accounts with out your consent in the event that they be taught it, and your solely possibility is to delete your account,” the put up mentioned.
The put up has since prompted backlash towards Glassdoor as customers fear about giving personally identifiable info to the corporate — and probably getting fired for giving evaluations about their present employers.
Legacy customers like Monica did not should enter their actual names when accessing Glassdoor initially — solely an e-mail tackle. The adjustments started when the corporate began integrating social options from Fishbowl, an app for workplace-related dialog, which can be owned by its mum or dad firm, in July.
Glassdoor’s phrases of use, revised final month, state that parts of a person’s profile, together with their names and profile photos, “could also be seen to different customers and the general public.” In sure circumstances, customers can share their profiles with third events, however Glassdoor reassures them that their profiles “won’t publicly embody or hyperlink” to the content material they submit “semi-/anonymously.”
Glassdoor’s privateness coverage states the corporate could accumulate profile info, together with names, resumes, ages, photos, telephone numbers, related social media, and extra from its customers.
After the combination started, Glassdoor began requiring customers to reveal their full names, job titles, and employers. A number of legacy customers who hadn’t shared their full names with Glassdoor discovered after they logged on that their names had been added to their profiles with out them understanding, in line with Wired.
“You’ll be able to’t each be verified and nameless,” Albert Fox Cahn, founder and govt director of the Surveillance Know-how Oversight Undertaking, a pro-privacy group, advised Wired. “You’ll be able to’t each be a social community and a confidential reporting area. You are able to do a kind of nicely, or you are able to do each of them badly.”
Glassdoor didn’t instantly reply to Entrepreneur’s request for remark.
