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Comment by altdataseller | Hacker News Reader

It might be possible to do linguistic analysis (ie. What they did to catch the Unabomber) to compare the language they used in the review vs how someone usually write in things like performance reviews, manager evaluations, emails, etc

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And they fire the wrong person. And the real poster adds another review. It can almost be a skit.

- Oct 12, 2022 "They fired Bobby!!! Bobby's been working with us for 10 years and they fired him overnight?? Told you that place is bonkers!"

- Oct 14, 2022 "Mona's down, I repeat Mona's down!! This is a sinking ship! Do not attempt to join this place!!!"

Meanwhile in the C-suite's office.

"Seriously, who is this guy?"

This could happen even if the culprit does get fired - as far as I know, there's nothing preventing you from posting reviews despite no longer being employed by the company.

> What they did to catch the Unabomber

Have everyone's siblings read all the reviews and see if anyone recognized it?

Exactly. Not sure what to do about only children. Buddy system early on I guess.

Most of the time they won't need to go that far. The review itself will usually indicate which department a person's from and what their main gripes are. Sure, this won't work for FAANG or a factory where everyone hates "long hours, low pay" though the text analysis probably won't help much either, but if it's someone from an SME's dev team (n=10), the dev team manager is going to have their suspicions as soon as they see the bullet point about rescinded work from home policies or lack of attention paid to testing deployments...

(the non-trivial possibility they'll get the wrong person isn't going to stop fingers being pointed)

Write your review, machine translate it into Mandarin, translate it back to English, and run it through a leet speak text filter

So you have to be a CIA spy to post a workplace review. Nice.

Isn't the final law here New Zealand's law?

No, they get the user information now - before any charge is made in New Zealand to justify providing access to the data.

I know it is cool to shit on the US, but:

   “We are deeply disappointed in the Court’s decision, which was effectively decided under New Zealand law.”

Yeah it was odd finding out this was an NZ decision. I was under the impression that they were a bit ahead of the US on privacy.

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