Glassdoor, the career website acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion in 2018, allows employees to leave anonymous, honest reviews about their employers and has a history of protecting its users from legal pressure from companies.
But a new report found that Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without consent, according to Ars Technica.
The saga began when Monica, a software professional based in the Midwest who did not reveal her last name, wrote a blog post on March 12 saying they joined Glassdoor 10 years ago and contributed reviews. But earlier this month, after they emailed support for help removing the information from their account, their real name was added to their profile.
Monica claims that the support team took her real name from the email request.
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“Glassdoor now requests your real name and will add it to older accounts without your consent if they find out, and your only option is to delete your account,” the post reads.
The post has since sparked backlash against Glassdoor as users worry about providing personally identifiable information to the company and could be fired for providing reviews about their current employers.
Legacy users like Monica didn’t have to enter their real names when logging into Glassdoor originally, just an email address. The changes began when the company began integrating the social features of Fishbowl, a workplace conversations app also owned by its parent company, in July.
Glassdoor’s terms of use, revised last month, state that parts of a user’s profile, including names and profile pictures, “may be visible to other users and the public.” In certain circumstances, users can share their profiles with third parties, but Glassdoor reassures them that their profiles “will not publicly include or link” to content they submit “semi/anonymously.”
Glassdoor’s privacy policy states that the company may collect profile information, including names, resumes, ages, pictures, phone numbers, linked social media, and more from its users.
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After the integration began, Glassdoor began requiring users to reveal their full names, job titles, and employers. Several legacy users who hadn’t shared their full names with Glassdoor discovered when they logged in that their names had been added to their profiles without them knowing, according to Wired.
“It’s not possible to be verified and anonymous at the same time,” Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a pro-privacy organization, told Wired. “You can’t be a social network and a confidential reporting space at the same time. You can do one well, or you can do both badly.”
Glassdoor did not immediately respond to the entrepreneur’s request for comment.