Glassdoor ordered to unmask former toy company employees who posted criticism
fortune.com
fortune.com
From the opinion:
> In New Zealand, statements of opinion are not categorically protected. New Zealand makes available a more limited protection, allowing the defendant in a defamation action to assert the defense of "honest opinion." ... The honest-opinion defense is an affirmative defense: the defendant bears the burden of proving that he honestly held the opinions he expressed.
> Here, then, the question under New Zealand law isn't whether the reviews on Glassdoor.com were opinions, but whether, if they were opinions, they reflected the reviewers' honest opinions. That question can't be answered now. The reviewers haven't even been identified, much less appeared in court and offered evidence on the genuineness of their opinions. Zuru, at this point, just wants discovery—to learn who wrote the reviews.
But how do you prove you actually believe something? FMRI images from when you make the statement? Polygraph? Sworn testimony from your friends that you said the same thing frequently, and seemed honest when doing so?
I have the same problem with "sincerely held religious belief" in America. You can't prove that a belief is sincerely held, and laws that reference this idea exist only to discriminate against unpopular faiths.
The easiest way to prove it in this case would be to subpoena statements made about the company in private, then compare them to the publicly stated opinion to see if there was a difference.
If, for example, the person was a stakeholder in a competitive company and documented that they were trying to hurt the company, then it obviously wouldn’t be an honest opinion. I’m guess that’s what the New Zealand law is trying to make illegal. (Although in the US that would be legal as long as your statements were an opinion that someone could possibly hold (i.e. not factual lies).)
An engineer at Ford could say that they think the new Silverado is a POS. It could be their honest opinion AND could be said for the purposes of damaging Chevy. Someone can be biased and still honest.
Even if you found evidence they made the opposite claim in another forum, they can still argue that their honest opinion changed over time.
You've offered an example of evidence against it being an "honestly-held opinion". You're still thinking of it as being the responsibility of the plaintiff to prove that the opinion was not honestly-held.
That's not the problem here! The plaintiff doesn't need any smoking gun like that. The defendant has to show that it was honestly-held. It doesn't sound like the plaintiff needs any evidence one way or another; if the defendant can't come up with affirmative evidence that it was honestly-held, they're liable. It sounds like an awful system.
It is certainly not impossible that one suddenly changed opinions and it had nothing to do with you trying to gain status within a new group (whether irl or social), but most people don't do that.
You don't in the US. A defendant is presumed innocent and needs to be proven guilty by a finder of fact. What needs to be shown is that the poster posted a statement that he knew was false.
This can be shown in many ways. The poster didn't actually work there and had no basis for the statement. The poster went on to post somewhere else that his job is fantastic and the best he ever had. The poster had a series of excellent employee reviews and raises. etc.
>> You don't in the US. A defendant is presumed innocent and needs to be proven guilty by a finder of fact. What needs to be shown is that the poster posted a statement that he knew was false.
Except this isn't about the US and the person you're responding to hasn't mentioned the US. This is about a lawsuit in New Zealand, where the burden of proof is not on the plaintiff, it's on the defendant to prove that they sincerely believed what they wrote. Hence the question.
Except that the article is about the decision of a US Federal judge. There is no court case filed in NZ, and NZ law doesn't apply in the US.
No, the article is about a New Zealand company using the discovery process of a lawsuit in CA to get the names of people they will, by their own admission, sue in New Zealand court.
From TFA: "In court, Zuru said it plans to file a defamation lawsuit in New Zealand against whoever posted these on Glassdoor, once their identities are revealed."
So, no, the rules for burden of proof in the US have nothing to do with this.
That quote clearly says there is no lawsuit in NZ.
> So, no, the rules for burden of proof in the US have nothing to do with this.
They do, since it should be clear they were not applied by Tse. That is the issue here, not an unfiled suit in another country, when the US federal courts have jurisdiction over the unmasking process.
I mean, you can cling to whatever fantasy you want, but it doesn't change the article:
"Even though the ruling occurred in a U.S. federal court, Judge Tse said he made the ruling based on New Zealand law, as Zuru intends to sue in that jurisdiction. Therefore, the court's ruling was decided based on New Zealand law's definition of defamation, and not the U.S. legal definition."
A US judge used New Zealand law to rule in favor of giving a New Zealand company data it plans on using to sue people for defamation in a New Zealand court. So, again, the question asked by the person you originally responded to had absolutely nothing to do with US burden of proof.
The article goes even further to say "In other words, Glassdoor shouldn't be ordered to turn over 'anonymous' user data in any case solely based on U.S. law." And yet, this is exactly how Tse ruled.
So, again, the question asked by the person you originally responded to had absolutely nothing to do with US burden of proof.
It's not a fantasy but a recognition that Tse was incorrect. The US SC has held that both online speech and anonymous speech are protected by the First Amendment.
> The article goes even further to say "In other words, Glassdoor shouldn't be ordered to turn over 'anonymous' user data in any case solely based on U.S. law." And yet, this is exactly how Tse ruled.
That's what I just said. Tse was incorrect.
My comment clearly stated US and not NZ.
So, for anyone with experience in New Zealand law: when this New Zealand company sues people in a New Zealand court of law (as is discussed in TFA), how would the defendants go about proving they sincerely believed something?
This isn’t about the US, and if it was in the US, it would be moot, because opinion is categorically protected, so you wouldn’t have to prove (on either side) whether it was honestly held.
Outside of the US, it is not uncommon for libel standards to be quite different and for the defense to have the burden of proof in things like truth, honest belief, etc. (where they are elements of defenses) once the plaintiff has established that the statements were harmful, and published by the defendant.
More so, in civil proceedings, it might be the defendant who has to prove innocence. For example if A and B sign a contract, B agrees to pay A under certain conditions, then doesn't pay claiming conditions were not met, and A sues B, the B has to prove payment isn't due as conditions weren't met. Give or take...
Defamation is usually, AFAIK, a civil affair.
Libel is a civil matter. You're thinking of criminal cases where there is a notion of guilt & presumption of innocence.
In the UK at least, it involves convincing the court that it was reasonable to have that opinion based on what you knew or believed to be true at the time. This may be a bad thing for people that honestly hold completely irrational prejudices, but the main challenge for the defence is proving the statement is best understood as an opinion (and not a false assertion of fact). The 'honesty' tends to follow by default, unless the other side can provide a more compelling alternative "it's convenient that your 'intuition' and an unrelated event four years earlier lead you to publicly voice suspicions about my client for the first time whilst you were competing directly with him for promotion".
(I assume the same is true of "sincerely held religious belief" in the US: pretty much any testimony or evidence of religious belief can be accepted unless it seems like a particularly creative excuse, completely unravels under cross-examination or is contradicted by evidence of that individual holding completely different religious beliefs?)
So the best (UK) defense seems to be to claim that you incidentally harmed someone's reputation with information that you believed to be true, while attempting to do something other than harming that person's reputation.
So NZ seems fairly progressive in comparison.
No, it just means your right to public criticism is dependent entirely on the public opinion of what is and isn't off-limits. You can say pretty much whatever you want as long as you don't direct it at the wrong person. This is of course a situation most Americans would find horrific.
So you can criticize poor people, just not the powerful. Yes, that sounds horrific.
Firstly the plaintiff must satisfy the judge that the specific act of defamation could have caused actual harm to their reputation. (This is probably the cause of your confusion, but it's a new bit actually intended to make it harder to sue for defamation/libel than before). If they don't do that, there's no case to answer even if the claims were tendentious and malicious.
If the plaintiff succeeds in that claim, the defendant can attempt to use the defence of honest opinion (or alternatively prove that on the balance of probability that the claim was true)
Obviously that's a tougher law on defendants than jurisdictions where the plaintiff has to prove that the claim is false and prove that the defendant knew it was false, but it's still quite easy to intentionally harm people's reputation by publishing things which are true, or simply a matter of opinion about their general character.
The headline reads like a major constitutional rights problem, since I guess I assume these headlines usually originate in the USA.
I don't see how any judge in any country is qualified to rule based on statutes in a completely different country.
The NZ company issued a subpoena to Glassdoor to produce information necessary for discovery for a NZ lawsuit which an American court upheld.
I've tried to argue with them to understand why it was considered spam (I posted only once), but they couldn't explain.
So it became really hard for me to consider Glassdoor a trustful source of information.
I would guess that anyone who goes after them will probably suddenly experience a flood of “totally legitimate” one-star ratings, and those reviews would find their way into the court case as a means of discrediting the prosecution’s efforts.
Source: experienced this sort of tactic firsthand in a similar kind of dispute over reputation.
So it's fine to post a review of a restaurant and accept a voucher to remove it. It's even fine to post an honest review and say "I will remove it if we resolve our dispute by refunding me my meal".
But you can't threaten them with "unless you pay me 100x my damages, I will write horrible things about you", even if they're true, since you don't have an existing right to 100x your damages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_Jackson is a good case for the boundaries here.
I think in the past few years they added some more credibly binding statements on their site about not removing or identifying user reviews. However, I don't know if this is actually the case or not.
This kind of suit is particularly concerning because:
1. How could an individual ever expect to stand against a $400M ARR company? (presuming there is a positive correlation between legal spend and outcomes)
2. When companies do this, they're siphoning off profit created by labor, to silence and suppress labor's best interests such as freedom of speech, transparent views into what it's like to work there, freedoms/rights of action and behavior outside the 9-5/cubicle (figuratively speaking).
The machinations of working class control working as designed.
Edit: but I do recognize this is also part of incentives. Companies pay glassdoor, not reviewers. Perhaps we stop using sites incentivized to destroy us?
I really want to see a larger conversation happening over this one day, but all I have are grumblings and ramblings.
Nearly every job I’ve had in the last five years (3) has launched internal campaigns that heavily pushed the “please write us a review on Glassdoor!” Requests. And the language made it pretty clear they only wanted to see the good stuff.
And by heavily I mean I have the distinct memory of counting how many emails I got in a single quarter with reminders that the deadline to send a review was coming up. That number was nine.
Adding to this: on the SAME DAY that my most recent job (a startup in the Northeast) laid off myself and 30% of other staff, we got an email in our personal inboxes asking for Glassdoor reviews, and asking if we’d like to join an “alumni committee” that would go out and do “community events” and other similar outings that the company will almost undoubtedly be using in recruiting posts and imagery.
It left me, someone who is already pretty cynical towards “workplace culture” at work even more cynical about the machinations of “workplace [mono]cultures”
I've seen this happen once, to the point where HR stepped in and said 'no, we don't do this!" to the execs that were pushing this. The irony was delicious.
3. Executives of the company are not going to go to jail to protect the identity of a user. If they get a properly executed subpoena, they will run it by the legal team but if there is no clear problem with it, they will act on it.
"It's better to be thought of as a garbage company by a few than to unleash your lawyers and remove all doubt."
A company I once worked for was violating several state laws. When I brought it to the owner's attention, he threatened to sue me. When I reported it to the state†, he fired me and said he was going to send his lawyers after me.
They never got the chance. The state shut him down a few weeks later.
†Note: When you report something to the state, in some states, you have no right to privacy. Not every state has whistleblower protections. This was explained to me by the state liaison I spoke with. He said under state law, he had to tell the employer who filed the complaint.
The Streisand Effect is starting to function like the Law of Averages in some people's minds. There is no publicity fairy flying around to right all wrongs. Publicizing things is extremely hard if they don't go viral, and they only go viral if they are funny, cute, bizarre, or incredibly cruel.
Ashamed that we have some of these. Not buying more. I get it that corporations are never going to be paragons of virtue and you don't want to know how the proverbial sausage gets made, but this kind of evil takes effort.
How can a US federal judge interpret New Zealand law? My mental model of the legal system is that a judge in the US would only make decisions based on US law.
My guess is that since this is a NZ company, that country's laws should apply, but Glassdoor being a US entity necessitates a US court applying (or enforcing) the law or judgment of NZ. For whatever strategic reason, their legal team sought a judgement in the US first.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comity
More info for anyone interested: https://columbialawreview.org/content/international-comity-i...
>Glassdoor is headquartered in this district, and under 28 U.S.C. § 1782(a), a district court can order persons within the district to produce discovery "for use in a proceeding in a foreign or international tribunal." >Given Glassdoor's focus on the merits of Zuru's defamation claim, first this must be noted: § 1782(a), the governing statute, doesn't require the Court to evaluate the merits of Zuru's claim before ordering Glassdoor to produce discovery in furtherance of it. >Congress enacted § 1782(a) "to provide federal-court assistance in gathering evidence for use in foreign tribunals." Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., 542 U.S. 241, 247 (2004). The statute is generous and reflects a hope that if federal courts assist with foreign litigation, foreign courts will do the same when the tables are turned. See ZF Auto. US, Inc. v. Luxshare, Ltd., 142 S. Ct. 2078, 2088 (2022) ("[T]he animating purpose of § 1782 is comity: Permitting federal courts to assist foreign and international governmental bodies promotes respect for foreign governments and encourages reciprocal assistance.").
However, consider a Delaware corporation contracts with a Michigan corporation to build a building in California. The check, drawn on a Florida bank account bounces, which causes a charge in Michigan corp’s Nevada bank account. Furthermore, in the original contract is a forum selection clause that says litigation is to occur in Kansas. Kansas may apply 1st 2nd or 3rd Restatement principles.
Which state’s laws apply? Which have jurisdiction?
They do all sorts of things to hide bad reviews and make companies look better than they are. This includes:
- altering the weights of reviews
- applying filters that hide unfavorable reviews
- excluding reviews from the rating score altogether
that's confusing.
That really hasn’t been the case since the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended in 2015. The new rule requires that discovery be “neither unreasonable nor unduly burdensome or expensive, considering the needs of the case, prior discovery in the case, the amount in controversy, and the importance of the issues at stake in the action.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(g)(1)(B)(iii) (1983)
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/pre...
Glassdoor is an American company. They probably had to sue in an American court to be able to legally compel them.
only a person who doesn't care about anonymity would do that.
If Glassdoor and the anonymous review doesn't violate US law, then shouldn't the US judge butt out of it? Wouldn't a NZ judge order Glassdoor to turn over the data? Who mediates claims between parties from different countries?
That's a completely question in general with different answers depending on context. For example, it matters whether it's a criminal case or a civil case.
If there's a contractual relationship between the affected parties, the contract often specifies this.
For defamation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation might be a good start.
One has no way of knowing what sort of data is in a company's database. Even if they take effort to anonymize your information, that may not be enough. Just assume that your identity is going to be revealed at some point and take steps to protect it.
They were acquired a few years ago but the founders had sold most of their shares and ultimately the investors just broke even (possibly loss, and pissed). It seems like the smaller the market (comparing Vancouver & Auckland) the more nasty and toxic the local industry is.
It's sad because after Hootsuite they were acting like they were next so took on VC money and proceeded to destroy/lie their own creation of 10+ years.
I once worked at an extremely toxic company, that derived pleasure from firing and threatening to fire people for any disagreement with "leadership". I remember looking at glassdoor to see if there was a warning there I missed when I accepted the offer. Monitoring it I noticed overall ridiculously high reviews, and only newer reviews where negative and made comments showing what I had observed. However rechecking in a few months I noticed those reviews were removed.
Certain people in the company really enjoyed threatening people with lawsuits, so I wasn't interest in trying to fight the tide and leave my own negative review, assuming that they would go out of their way to id me. Still the fact that such an awful company could have such glowing reviews forever turned me off from glassdoor.
Glassdoor would probably be ordered to reveal ip address, and email. To block this the reviewer would need to use a one time anonymous email, and anonymous vpn. In turn, you can’t really trust either of those parties not to reveal your identity (although it might take more time). If I was to do something sensitive on such a site - I would use as many layers of indirection as I thought the companies legal team would be willing to expend in time. After 3-5 such proxies, it’s likely they would give up or at least have to expend 6 months to a year of legal effort to get to your actual identity.
Note that in the above, financial contracts with email providers/etc will be a second method to de-anonymize you, and they are much faster to trace and much harder to avoid.
Your best bet would be to get the free tier of every such service, and use a library computer/public Wi-Fi which does not require authentication and doesn’t have video recordings :shrug:
This is ridiculous.
A US judge should not unmask someone's privacy on behalf of a company in NZ that hasn't filed a defamation lawsuit in the US against the poster. The NZ company should file a US case and then convince the judge to unmask the poster.
This was social engineering on the part of the NZ company and was also Judge Tse overstepping his authority. There is no reason to even have laws in the US, when a judge can decide to apply foreign law that doesn't originate or cover people here.
How can this possibly be allowed to exist? Can I file in my jurisdiction of choice and then bring along the most favourable laws from any others?
Bahaha. Good job Zuru.
Accidental self-own?
Such reviews are probably THE killer app for ZKP.
As an individual, I could post 1,000 bad reviews instead of just 1. As a competitor, I could do the same.
Glassdoor just wouldn't work if they couldn't verify someone's identity somehow.
If you have ZK verifiable credentials it would be rather hard to create all these identities and get them verified.
Crypto seems to be great when waving problems away, but no one seems to be able to give implementation details.
There are a bunch of authorities that proof you're a human already. They give you passport and the like. There is nothing prohibiting them from giving you a verifiable credential in addition of a passport.
Also, there are services that proof your humanity all over the internet. Letting them give out verifiable credentials and asking Glassdoor to accept them as trusted credential issuer is the easy part here.
Glassdoor can either check the signature of such a credential or, in the ZKP case, you proof them that you have such a credential without revealing it.
Getting people to adopt your thing is the hard part. The rest is just PKI, we know how to do PKI.
Except they don't do that today, at least in Glassdoor's biggest market (the US). And anyway, all you prove with a credential is that the person is holding a valid credential. You have no idea if it was stolen.
If you used social security numbers for this, for example, a single person could have posted millions of reviews on Glassdoor.
> Also, there are services that proof your humanity all over the internet.
Which ones? The only services that do this are the government and credit bureaus, so the digital services all have to tie in to one of those things. That means that someone is getting your real identity, which doesn't prevent the type of subpoena we're talking about in this case.
And on top of that, those identity checks can be anywhere from $1 to $20. There's no way Glassdoor would survive that.
I would love for a trustworthy Glassdoor-like source, but I think there isn't a business plan that justifies the cost of building the network that doesn't also have the end goal being selling out to the employers.
I'll illustrate with a personal anecdote, recently I was looking at levels.fyi negotiation service, and I thought to myself $1800 seems way over priced! but then it dawned on me, so long the EROI is > $1800 in better offers, then I might as well use it, right?
For what workers lack in individual power, they overwhelm in aggregate value, if a service could provide positive value on $10 a month to a lot of workers they could make bank. Would you pay $10 a month to
1. Have a better manager
2. Get paid a high percentage of your true maximal value
3. Avoid companies that require therapy during/after the fact
4. Increase your inter-company mobility reducing periods of unemployment
An ideal glassdoor should be able to provide this.
As I write this out I kind of realize this is kind of like a market solution to unions.
Workers in America are constantly trodden on. There’s no module to import here, the culture is bad and the laws are weak and more and more people are realizing it.
It should be legal, protected speech to speak ill of a company. They aren’t people, they’re not even really objects from a certain point of view.
If you ask me, there’s a different sort of “zero knowledge” problem happening here.
In New Zealand too, right? The company doing the suing is in New Zealand, not America, and the worker probably is too.
I'm sure workers are relatively trodden on everywhere, in various magnitudes.
Fixed it for you.
In some ways they have it better than people. All the rights but don’t get punished in a meaningful way when they do wrong.
The problems here aren't technical. These are legal issues. Issues with Glassdoor's business model.