Anonymous review site Glassdoor now consults public sources to identify users.

Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees’ reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor’s support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name.

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. But in 2021, Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl, a professional networking app that integrated with Glassdoor last July. This acquisition meant that every Glassdoor user was automatically signed up for a Fishbowl account. And because Fishbowl requires users to verify their identities, Glassdoor’s terms of service changed to require all users to be verified.

  • the post of tom joad
    19·
    8 months ago

    Monica told Ars that Glassdoor deleted her data in a few days, much faster than the 30-day estimate. The process to request data erasure was “a little unclear but not too hard,” Monica said. But the process of deleting her Fishbowl account was less clear.

    Glassdoor’s support team told Monica that the only way to delete information from her Fishbowl account was to “download the Fishbowl app and log in with either a social connection, your work email, or phone number to gain access to your account.”

    This sounds illegal.This should be illegal

    also the temerity of the glassdoor manager, responding to her anger about their updating her profile with her real name without her consent That they stole from an email she sent in an attempt to DELETE her account. Ooh just listen to him:

    “I stand behind the decision that your name has to be placed on your profile and it cannot be reverted back to just your initials or nullified/anonymized from the platform,” Glassdoor’s manager wrote, confirming that Monica’s case was now considered closed. “I am sorry that we disagree on this issue. We treat all users equally when it comes to what is eligible to be placed on the profile and what is not, but we know that there are times our users, such as yourself, may not always agree with us.”

    Ooooooh >~<

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
      11·
      8 months ago

      It should be illegal for a company to sign you up for an account on any other platform than the one you made the account for.

      If I sign up for Facebook I don’t want to have an Instagram account, or vice versa.

      If they want to integrate everything then put it all under one platform name. If they need to you have a “Meta” account to use Facebook and Instagram, then you at least know you can delete your meta account information and it won’t show up in two different places. One centralized place for your information.

      • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        It absolutely should be, how could anyone have possibly accepted the terms and conditions of a Fishbowl account?!