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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea (kinda like a no-frills Glassdoor), but the moment I went to plug in my company, the first thing that pops up is a LinkedIn permissions page.

No prior explanation of what the data will be used for, no assurance that my information will be anonymous, nothing. Closed the tab.

Please consider supporting alternate signup methods for those of us that don't want personal information tied to reviews. I know you very well may not do this, but if you don't tell people that up front, the mind goes places...

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Seconded. If you want people to be honest about their employers, tying it to the one place employers are almost certain to see it is a little daunting. I understand if you want to make sure they're actually employees of the place they're talking about, but (a) you should say that, and (b) what's to stop me from faking my LinkedIn?

Thanks for the feedback! We're adding a bit about the LinkedIn verification. For this MVP it is an easy way to check (within reason) someone actually works at a place. Sure, they may lie to linkedin, but for the MVP it was an 80/20 decision.

In its early days, Facebook used email verification at a certain domain to verify membership to a uni. Perhaps you could do the same?

I like that line of reasoning. I think the anonymity and peace of mind a company has NO way of tracking who visited the site would be degraded with work emails. Most US companies can and do read employee emails...Thanks for the feedback!

Agreed. I just deleted my LinkedIn due to privacy concerns so I couldn't use this if I wanted to.

Yep, totes.

I deleted my LinkedIn account months ago. This service could be pretty useful/interesting/funny to share around the office, but requiring LinkedIn is a killer (in a bad way) for me.

Thanks for the feedback.

We're looking at other ways now to check if someone works at the company without requiring LinkedIn.

We will repost to HN once we add a second verification feature.

for what it's worth, this doesn't really seem like an effective way of verifying that someone works for a company in the first place.

Thanks for the input!

EXCELLENT feedback - I really appreciate it. We piggy-backed LinkedIn to "build on the shoulders of giants" but agree the explanation is necessary. Thanks again!

At this point, you might consider a more manual verification of people. Do things that don't scale, remember? :)

From experience, you can manually verify a lot and have a very few false positives. You might just require a bit more person to person interaction.

Nice point... this is what we do now for HR (paid) accounts... worth considering for sure...

Thanks again for the advice - wanted to let you know we updated the site over the weekend with better explanation of LinkedIn, an explicit privacy policy, and an alternate (albeit it a little heavy) way of asking for an account without LinkedIn.

Yes - this is the problem that most feedback sites have. I believe that Glassdoor uses Facebook as the verification. That way they at least know you are a real person, even if they can't explicitly verify that you actually worked there.

Indeed. We toyed with Facebook login, but we really wanted the current position information, without having to do a domain (work email) verification.

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