Glassdoor, the roles web site acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion in 2018, permits staff to go away nameless, sincere opinions about their employers — and had a historical past of defending its customers towards authorized pressures from companies.
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 title, wrote a March 12 weblog publish saying they joined Glassdoor 10 years in the past and have contributed opinions. However earlier this month, after emailing assist to request assist eradicating data from their account, their actual title was added to their profile.
Monica claims the assist staff 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 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 probably getting fired for giving opinions about their present employers.
Legacy customers like Monica did not need to enter their actual names when accessing Glassdoor initially — solely an electronic mail tackle. 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 father or mother 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 footage, “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 might gather profile data, together with names, resumes, ages, footage, cellphone numbers, related social media, and extra from its customers.
After the mixing 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 once they logged on that their names had been added to their profiles with out them realizing, in line with Wired.
“You may’t each be verified and nameless,” Albert Fox Cahn, founder and govt director of the Surveillance Expertise Oversight Undertaking, a pro-privacy group, informed Wired. “You may’t each be a social community and a confidential reporting area. You are able to do a type of effectively, or you are able to do each of them badly.”
Glassdoor didn’t instantly reply to Entrepreneur’s request for remark.