Glassdoor, the roles web site acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion in 2018, permits staff to go away nameless, trustworthy 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 consumer profiles with out consent, per Ars Technica.
The saga started when Monica, a Midwest-based software program skilled who didn’t disclose her final identify, wrote a March 12 weblog publish saying they joined Glassdoor 10 years in the past and have contributed evaluations. However earlier this month, after emailing help to request assist eradicating data from their account, their actual identify was added to their profile.
Monica claims the help group took their actual identify from the e-mail request.
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“Glassdoor now requires your actual identify and can add it to older accounts with out your consent in the event that they study it, and your solely possibility is to delete your account,” the publish stated.
The publish has since prompted backlash towards Glassdoor as customers fear about giving personally identifiable data to the corporate — and presumably getting fired for giving evaluations about their present employers.
Legacy customers like Monica did not must enter their actual names when accessing Glassdoor initially — solely an e-mail deal with. The modifications started when the corporate began integrating social options from Fishbowl, an app for workplace-related dialog, which can also be owned by its mother or father firm, in July.
Glassdoor’s phrases of use, revised final month, state that parts of a consumer’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 “is not going to publicly embrace or hyperlink” to the content material they submit “semi-/anonymously.”
Glassdoor’s privateness coverage states the corporate could accumulate profile data, together with names, resumes, ages, photos, cellphone numbers, linked 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 accordance with Wired.
“You’ll be able to’t each be verified and nameless,” Albert Fox Cahn, founder and government director of the Surveillance Know-how Oversight Mission, a pro-privacy group, informed 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.