Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent | Hacker News Reader

Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent

arstechnica.com

139 pointsLinuxBender31 comments

I'm stunned by how time & again, companies manage to fubar a running business for no reason whatsoever.

Not a clue how Glassdoor was doing before. And sure, in any field there may be competition. Business models energe & go away over time. Markets change, and successive CEOs, managers etc may have different ideas (and success) in addressing that.

But how could anyone at Glassdoor think that this policy change would not drive users away? That this would not hurt their business? (all else equal, fewer users = less profit).

If there were an upside to this policy change, sure. Weigh pros vs cons. Ask users. Do some A/B tests or whatever.

But this reads like a change with only downsides (for users, and potentially very significant) vs. little (if any) gain for the company. Why do it then?

"If it isn't broken, don't fix it", how hard is that?

> But how could anyone at Glassdoor think that this policy change would not drive users away?

Money. Because somebody there thought this will make them more money.

Sounds like “I chopped my arm off to reduce my weight so I could run faster.” Without realization that the arm weight is there for a reason. Businesses love to self sabotage.

Sold the car for fuel money

They have a lot of dark patterns. They suck

Glassdoor has to be the most broken website I’ve ever used. Even if you go through with their dark patterns, the site flat out doesn’t work. It’s shown a generic error message to me on the home page for the last 6 months now.

Their app is also completely broken and their search barely works. It's astonishing how bad it is, considering that Glassdoor's business model revolves around its online presence.

The business model revolves around getting employers to pay for a presence. The website is a cost center.

“If you aren’t paying for the product you are the product.”

Employers pay Glassdoor for recruits. This change will disproportionately cause deletion of negative reviews, which Glassdoor has made suspiciously easy. This makes the paying customers look better.

Interesting, after reading this I went to go check my anonymized glassdoor profile (yeah, I would never risk getting fired by giving this company my real name) and discovered that all my reviews were deleted.

Coincidentally when I logged in to my account, for the first time in years, they also pulled my reviews. I got one email for each of them, saying:

"Our moderators evaluate each review to determine whether it complies with our Community Guidelines. We determined your review does not meet these guidelines.

If you wish, you are welcome to edit your review here and your edited review will be reevaluated within 24 hours of receipt."

I just went through the process of deleting my content using their data removal tool and their mechanism for deleting your data triggers those "X was removed for violating community guidelines" emails for everything it deletes. I had 9 emails from them as soon as I submitted it.

I was wondering what those were triggered by. I actually thought it was a shady attempt to get you to come back and engage. I got several soon after submitting my data deletion request.

Yeah, you can't "pay to remove a review," but if you pay Glassdoor and report every review you don't like for ToS violations, 40% of them disappear regardless of any violations. You can't appeal, for a long time you weren't notified, you can't ask why (though you can re-edit till you find a version that survives a couple moderators), and if they leave the review up then your employer can respond however they like without recourse (unreportable, you can't edit your review once your employer has responded, ...). Your reviews can be removed even after internal moderators have already approved them. The reviews aren't sorted by publicly rated helpfulness or by chronology.

This is true. While there is no explicit "pay to remove", if you have a premium account you have far more power to remove reviews you don't like.

Source: I know of a company that paid for a huge package, and routinely removed bad (true) reviews about said company. They loved it.

Indeed is owned by the same Japanese holding company as Glassdoor. Would be careful there too.

Took some digging but here’s the form that should cover all the HR Tech sites including indeed. https://requests.hrtechprivacy.com/create

Be sure to select “show more sites” in the sites selection.

Took some digging but here’s the data delete request form that should cover all the HR Tech sites including Indeed: https://requests.hrtechprivacy.com/create

And for Glassdoor, bottom of this page:

https://help.glassdoor.com/s/privacyrequest?language=en_US

Be sure to select “show more sites” in the sites selection.

Facebook has locked an account I've had forever (like back from when it required a .edu address) until I give them a "Photo ID".

Yeah. I think not.

Quite some time ago I signed up for twitter and then 10 minutes later they blocked my account and asked for a phone number. Said no and never signed up again.

Then just a few months later the first big leaks of information including phone numbers started coming out.

"Real" information like this is way to expensive for companies like this to have. Having your name get leaked is enough to get you blacklisted in many industries.

I had the same experience with twitter, but I decided to be difficult about it: after about a month of daily complaints, they finally unblocked my account, without (of course) ever admitting that they had blocked it solely to squeeze a phone number out of me.

Turns out, I have no real use for their service, and I can't remember when I last logged in; but it felt like a moral victory.

> "Real" information like this is way [too] expensive for companies like this to have.

Or rather, mistakes are not expensive enough to deter them from over-collecting and under-protecting.

It is inconsistent.

It locked my account as well, but then, many years later, sent me a magic link to sign in --I ignored it for a very long time, but then one day I needed to get some info and tried the link and it worked. So, yeah, that company, it's very inconsistent.

    1. Deanonymize users
    2. ???
    3. Profit

I literally can't figure out what step 2 is supposed to be there, I guess this is why people go get MBAs in order to understand 5D chess moves like this.

When I logged in on mobile web Glassdoor forced me into a signup flow for something called Communities which included asking for my employment status. I was able to time a stop before the full page load and navigate to the account page.

If you log in first you can navigate directly to this URL without answering any questions: https://www.glassdoor.com/member/profile/accountSettings which will allow you to close your account.

You then need to request they delete your data which can be done at https://help.glassdoor.com/s/privacyrequest?language=en_US

Looking quickly at the site, I don't see de-anonymized users. I don't see any user profiles at all. Just job titles.

Has anybody been able to independently verify this?

You guys use your real name?

The issue is that they can add your name without consulting you. The user mentioned in the article, Monica, took her name from a support email she sent for something and added it to her profile without asking - then they didn’t give her any way to remove it.

The article also mentions that they can add data they collect from third parties, so it’s overall pretty sketch.

Well, That is awful to hear. I use an email address that is not connected with me in any other way for sites like that. I don't use my real name. I don't use that email address for anything connected to me. I assumed this was sort of standard practice for tech minded people.

Never trust anything on the Internet. Just don't.

Now where's the tool to lookup all my coworkers.

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