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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
(Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)
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.
The EFF regularly defends Glassdoor users from being unmasked by retaliating employers.
She decided to go through with a data erasure request, which Glassdoor estimated could take up to 30 days.
In the meantime, her name remained on her profile, where it wasn’t publicly available to employers but it could be used to link her to job reviews if Glassdoor introduced a bug in an update or data was ever breached, she feared.
“No one has the ability to see your user profile and the contents within it, meaning no one, including your employer, will be able to see your details,” Glassdoor’s employee wrote.
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