Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

If anybody doesn&#x27;t think this is a problem, I overheard managers talking about a 3rd-party tool that finds &quot;at risk employees&quot; which they didn&#x27;t define but said it included signals such as &quot;they updated their linked in recently&quot; as a signal that they may be on the job hunt.<p>You better believe that data brokers are both interested in buying and selling any sort of information around your employment&#x2F;job&#x2F;interview behaviors.

I keep thinking about this response from a glassdoor employee, and what it implies about their decision making processes:<p><pre><code> I stand behind the decision that your name has to be placed on your profile and it cannot be reverted or nullified&#x2F;anonymized from the platform. I am sorry that we disagree on this issue. [...] This is my final determination. I, as well as multiple members of my team, have reviewed your request several times, and I am considering this matter closed.</code></pre>

I think Glassdoor has the issue in that its not a growth business, but needs to be. You can&#x27;t have a website like Glassdoor that is VC funded, owned by PE or publicly traded and not have it go to shit. The organic usage is people looking for new jobs, or posting about jobs they hate, or companies responding. A website that has &lt;20 employees and is fine with being a $10M a year business living off of ad revenue could absolutely do this and be successful. A business seeking to double revenue can&#x27;t.

Decided to visit the website to delete my account. Lo and behold, the &quot;Deactivate Account&quot; button kicks off a perpetual loop that asks you to &quot;Sign In Again To Delete Account&quot; then dumps you on the same profile setting page, which prompts you again to log in... so you can&#x27;t really delete your account, at least on web, without the help of support.<p>Edit: figured it out, is confusing<p>1. Remove social connection if this is how you logged in 2. Log Out 3. Upon login, request a password reset 4. Reset and login 5. Request Deletion 6. Enter newly created password

Aren&#x27;t Glassdoor&#x27;s reviews pretty much a scam anyway? Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete&#x2F;downrank bad reviews.

Glassdoor seems very has-been at this point. They’re trying to move beyond the mix of folks trashing their employers and then charging employers to make the profile look better to now trying to be more of a serious career site. The ship has sailed on that front and they just seem on a slow march to irrelevance as has happened to lots of other similar career and employer review sites.

Took some digging but here’s the data delete request form that should cover all the HR Tech sites including Indeed: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;requests.hrtechprivacy.com&#x2F;create" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;requests.hrtechprivacy.com&#x2F;create</a><p>Be sure to select “show more sites” in the sites selection.<p>And for Glassdoor, bottom of this page:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.glassdoor.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;privacyrequest?language=en_US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.glassdoor.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;privacyrequest?language=en_US</a>

I just logged in for the first time in years to delete my account, and before letting me do anything they required me to add my full name and other employment info.

This is pretty shocking. I never use Glassdoor anyway, so deleted my account after reading. Worth noting that going to Settings only shows a button that says &quot;Deactivate account&quot;, which seems misleading. Following this process does show a modal at the end that says &quot;Account Deleted Confirmation. You have successfully deleted your account.&quot;, so seems like this is actually deletion vs. deactivation. (Your data stays in an archive DB for some period of time for legal reasons.)

Wow, big dark UX pattern when trying to sign in now. I&#x27;m quite positive that I never linked my glassdoor account to google. Yet, Glassdoor was ambiguously saying on login &quot;use your google account to login for your @gmail address!&quot;. To which google asked &quot;are you sure you want to share info with glassdoor.&quot;<p>There was no way to enter my old password, I was forced to now link my account with google which force shared my email &amp; name. I was really nervous about even enabling this linking... I bit the bullet, happily it looks like it is somewhat easy to delete reviews and finally the account. Getting there though, was forced to divulge new information.<p>I don&#x27;t think I could have a lower opinion of glassdoor now..

If this is how they&#x27;re going to play it, RIP Glassdoor. Seems like a MAJOR breach of trust to allow users to submit content and participate anonymously THEN start revealing their names!<p>&quot;If you are not willing to allow your name on your profile, you will again need to complete Data erasure once you are able to. However, we cannot remove this for you or make the changes you wish to see for your name.&quot;<p>I guess we know the appropriate action to take here. This is an absolutely BONE HEADED decision with regards to the operation of Glassdoor but I wonder what was the impetus for this? It looks like they&#x27;re trying to convert their anonymous, Reddit-like, users to First Class Named Users for the purpose trying to compete with Linkedin to me.<p>I find the rationale here questionable and the execution plain nutty personally.

It will be pretty hilarious if we see 500 positive reviews exposed as being from Terry from HR on Glassdoor. Maybe it will help legitimize it a little.

I have not logged into Glassdoor in a long time, I tried to log in after seeing this.<p>I get a prompt that I cannot dismiss about &quot;Communities at Glassdoor&quot; that I can&#x27;t get past without putting in my employment information and name...<p>I can&#x27;t even get too my account to delete it or emails support.<p>Love dark patterns...

As a senior manager I worked closely with a VP of engineering on the engineering culture - one of the expected outcome was the improvement of our Glassdoor company rating. But my VP (and probably the leadership) wanted to go fast. So my VP was in touch with someone at Glassdoor and had a way to &#x27;tweak&#x27; or remove unpleasant reviews. I don&#x27;t know the details but if there is definitely a way for companies to do that despite Glassdoor claiming that reviews can&#x27;t be removed.

You should request your data from a company like axciom. You can ask them to delete it while you’re at it.<p>They already know more about you than you’d ever want them to know. The fact that they hadn’t automatically matched your name before was either incompetence or simply being blocked by some frayed little law somewhere.<p>A little off topic, but his is a classic example of the problem where the laws just haven’t kept up with the technology.<p>Data collection and public government databases weren’t a problem when you had to go into some big office building somewhere to make a request, or maybe wait a couple weeks to sort it out through the mail.<p>Today, however, it’s easier than ever to gather this data at scales people can’t even imagine and this level of aggregation has eroded privacy to a degree that I don’t think is reversible anymore.<p>Anyway, here is a link to axcioms portal, although the cynic in me thinks that by requesting your data be deleted, all you’re doing is confirming your identity.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacyportal.onetrust.com&#x2F;webform&#x2F;342ca6ac-4177-4827-b61e-19070296cbd3&#x2F;7229a09c-578f-4ac6-a987-e0428a7b877e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacyportal.onetrust.com&#x2F;webform&#x2F;342ca6ac-4177-482...</a>

Love the change. Now I can signup with employee name I dislike like a powerful manager and get them out.

Well, I&#x27;ve understood Glassdoor to be useless for years due to supposedly allowing companies to control the existence of negative reviews, and I&#x27;ve never had an account. However, this is pretty disturbing and deserves to be more widely known if Glassdoor is actually now <i>hostile</i> to employees who might review former employers.

Wow, in the EU one email to the local data protection office would set them on fire for this.

Done, account deleted, and thank you for the heads up. Genuinely, thankful for that post and maybe the most important social network I’m a part of: Hacker News.

Surely this would discourage anyone posting legitimate reviews of their workplace but quite honestly, Glassdoor seems to only be for companies themselves to have a &quot;badge&quot; and not the potential employees.<p>I don&#x27;t think it would be missed if it were to disappear tomorrow.

I had an employee on my team at a company I worked for once who used the CFO&#x27;s real name to post a review trashing the company.<p>The real name policy had the opposite of the intended effect.

All this &quot;my final determination&quot; and &quot;your other surprise account&quot; nonsense could be rectified pretty quickly with a GDPR banhammer. I am increasingly of the opinion that personal info of any kind should be legally radioactive, and very high-risk for companies to hold onto or collect.

German site kununu may also be forced to disclose clear names of previously anonymous reviews [0]<p>So, what&#x27;s left besides word of mouth?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.golem.de&#x2F;news&#x2F;urteil-kununu-muss-im-streitfall-klarnamen-nennen-2402-182309.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.golem.de&#x2F;news&#x2F;urteil-kununu-muss-im-streitfall-k...</a> (sorry, article in german)

Thank you, I deleted my account.

This is precisely why I never created a glassdoor account. It&#x27;s exactly the kind of thing I feared would happen.

&gt; Glassdoor now requires your real name and will add it to older accounts without your consent if they learn it, and your only option is to delete your account.<p>weird. I just logged in, and I can&#x27;t confirm that this is happening. all of my reviews are still properly anonymous. my account knows my name and my email address, of course, but it does not appear anywhere on the site where I don&#x27;t expect it to.<p>&gt; So all users will now receive a Fishbowl account once they login to Glassdoor<p>I&#x27;m not real sure what this means - as far as I can tell, &#x27;bowls&#x27; are just the equivalent of fb groups, and while there are a few automatically added to your account initially, you can just leave them, and proceed with an empty list of &#x27;bowls&#x27; you follow (or whatever the terminology is)<p>what am I missing here?

I definitely want to hear this from Glassdoor. I just can&#x27;t imagine why Glassdoor would put a user&#x27;s name alongside a review against the wish of the user in question. So I&#x27;ll give Glassdoor a chance to clarify what&#x27;s happening before getting my pitchfork.

Danish payment app MobilePay also just revealed the full name of all its users, linked to the government database.<p>You can enter any phone number and the full name of the user will be shown. Previously a user-selectable name, now it&#x27;s coming from the government database of citizens.

It&#x27;s very possible that the full name from the email to the person&#x27;s Glassdoor account was not manually performed by a human.<p>More than likely, their CRM software automatically tied their user-facing account with their support ticket email. Especially if the only unique identifier is based on email address. It&#x27;s not hard to remove the name and location from the CRM, but because it would become a manual process they just don&#x27;t want to have to deal with it.<p>FWIW, this theory could be put to test by signing up an account with username.extrachars@gmail.com and then sending a support email from username.extrachars+1@gmail.com, not sure if they would reject the support ticket as &quot;emails not matched&quot;.

I haven’t used Glassdoor for years. I just checked and my account didn’t have any personal information listed. My name and other fields in my profile were “*”<p>I didn’t see a way to delete my data but I don’t think they had much in the first place.<p>I did use the “deactivate account” option.

Site is close to unusable anyway. I have gotten emails from them about potentially interesting jobs, and then could never figure out how to actually view the job postings. Instead I’m sent through their review workflow to get access.

All of these shenanigans occur because the laws favor employers over employees; there’s no protection, or at least, proper freedom of speech. But what can you expect when employees can be fired on the spot for asking to unionize?

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we need strong laws on data brokers. to protect our privacy from foreign and domestic actors.

All US tech companies ever, they are out there to doing the right thing until money rolls in then profits take the priority over quality and they go down the shitter.<p>1) Evernote<p>2) Triplebyte<p>3) Glassdoor<p>4) Let&#x27;s not forget Quora

I guess all I can do is upvote this, and hope the sunshine helps lead to the demise of those who turn the public goodwill they&#x27;ve solicited -- here, transparency into employment practices -- against the very folks they&#x27;ve gotten to exercise it.<p>I guess we all know now not to work for Glassdoor...<p>(Including the unpaid work that built their product in the first place.)

Captcha Check<p>Hello, you&#x27;ve been (semi-randomly) selected to take a CAPTCHA to validate your requests. Please complete it below and hit the button!<p>Press to validate<p>No thanks.

&gt;they had updated my profile to add my real name and location, the name pulled from the email From line I didn&#x27;t think to cloak because who does that?<p>How did they get that if you never sent them an email? And if you sent them an email, you gave them your name (whatever name is in the from line)

That’s super slimy of them — a while back I had spent some time investigating fake reviews on their platform [1] and also found that their moderation team has no strict processes in place to deal with bad actors.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.careerfair.io&#x2F;company-reviews" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.careerfair.io&#x2F;company-reviews</a>

I&#x27;m not wildly surprised, and am kinda getting the impression, that companies can fuck individuals any way they want, but… this couldn&#x27;t be legal, right? I mean, especially the &quot;that would be forthcoming&quot; part.

Thanks! You&#x27;re right.<p>Just deleted all my glassdoor contributions, then deactivated my glassdoor account.

&gt; your Glassdoor account<p>null pointer exception

While you&#x27;re at it, don&#x27;t forget to freeze your Work Number.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Work_Number" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Work_Number</a>

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When I signed up for Blind, I remember being a concerned that I had to use my work email to sign up. At the very least the employer can see that you signed up via the verification email.

Tend to use blind for the inside scoop these days anyway

Weird. I only see the option to deactivate an account, not delete or even close.<p>Damn this terribly company and their terrible, terrible dark patterns.

Out of curiosity, I had a look at my account on glassdoor and my name is &quot;Rollo Tomasi&quot;. Seems about right :)

What the actual fuck, glasdoor just died for me. Tinker around with data to that degree is a nogo by all means.

Shit, and I hate how all of these &#x27;auto-login&#x27; prompts appear in Chrome, and if you accidentally click it, then boom, now your name is all over the place. Think this is how I ended up in GlassDoor to begin with.

Good luck &#x27;deactivating&#x27; your account. Somehow I was registered via Facebook. I was able to sign in via Facebook. Then they force you to give your company, title, location, and name before they allow you access to anything, including settings (scum). Then when you click deactivate you have to sign in again, and the Facebook login just redirects to a blank page and deactivation doesn&#x27;t occur.

My God what a sleazy company this is. I just logged in for the first time in ages to delete my account and it immediately gave me an inescapable modal requiring personal information, including my name!<p>I stopped using the site years ago once it became clear how corrupt they were about handling blatantly fake reviews, but this new name policy is a new low. Glassdoor can&#x27;t be run out of business fast enough.

Wow, never using that service again, thanks for the heads up.

Tell me you don&#x27;t understand what makes your own website mildly attractive to employees without telling Mr.<p>Glassdoor has been mostly useless for quite some time now anyway. HR departments offer little trinkets to employees who leave a good review to boost their score, negative reviews can be taken down. Minimal value all around basically.

It&#x27;s both funny and sad when people find out how the real world works and get all indignant. &quot;How dare they do a thing they&#x27;re legally allowed to do! Rabble rabble rabble!!!&quot; Glassdoor is trying to make money off you, like every other free site on the internet, and they will do whatever the law allows them to. Welcome to planet Earth.<p>Meanwhile, all the commenters in here are overreacting as usual, clearly not having read any of the terms of the website, like the part where it says your name is not disclosed until you explicitly elect to share it. But hey let&#x27;s not let facts stop us from freaking out.

Glassdoor is one of the worst and first examples of &quot;annoying paywalls&quot; that I remember. (they don&#x27;t require payment, but your login and personal info)

Done. Thank you for the headsup

The enshittification of the world continues apace.

Glassdoor is so gross sometimes with its requirements.<p>Levels.fyi has been really nice.

Sue the fuck out of them. Hope this company crashes and burns.

That&#x27;s absolutely batshit insane if true. How do they not understand that no one will use their site if they can&#x27;t do it anonymously?!

Disgusting. Thought about creating an account several times to see more salary information, but now I guess I never will.