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Glassdoor not so anonymous

webworm.co

291–300 of 507 posts

Re: Glassdoor not so anonymous

#291
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Probably because doing so is hard. You not only have to verify that a review is coming from an actual current or former employee, but then you have to ensure that the same employee cannot write multiple reviews. If you discard all links between a reviewer account and a review, how do you do that? I imagine there's some sort of zero-knowledge magic cryptographic thing you can do (or maybe something simpler, like a...…

Can’t you hash the email and then store only the hash? If your hashing alghorithm is heavy enough you could easily figure out that a review is already posted, but brute forcing the original value would be impractical.

Email addresses aren’t usually secret though. If an employer happens to know the personal emails of a large fraction of its workers, it isn’t going to be meaningfully slowed down by a hash. 1M addresses * 1 second/address = ~12 days (and in practice a lot less since hashing is nearly trivial to parallelize)

Re: Glassdoor not so anonymous

#293
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IIRC Danish law states that work email may be used for private purposes and that anything clearly labeled as private is to be considered such. For example, by moving email to a folder called “private”. For the employer to open/read such communication would be highly illegal, akin to opening others private snail mail. I do believe that this also extends to corporate issued phones and computers. Especially since you’re…

> Especially since you’re automatically taxed for “private use” of such equipment when assigned. so you get charged a tax when an employer gives you equipment required for work? What happens if you can't afford that tax then? This feels very wrong - taxing someone for a potential benefit when it is not proven that such benefit exists.

It's up to you if you want to use company provided equipment for personal/private use or not. If you declare that it's only used for work purposes, there is no tax. The tax makes sense, because it's effectively extra salary (eg if the company gave you a leased car).

Re: Glassdoor not so anonymous

#294

If I were the Glassdoor IT admin, I would give out silly names with false IPs. The best solution is to have zero knowledge (delete all info that can identify a user), but the second best thing is to have double logs. A real one (internal use only) and a false one (for legal usage only). I know it goes against the moral/legal sense, but hey we're living in strange times and the best thing is not to go against multi bi…

That would be illegal and prone to surface at one point or another, the best policy is to not keep logs on any service that touts itself as anonymous.

Re: Glassdoor not so anonymous

#295

Why don't they make the whole process anonymous? After verifying that you work for a company, why don't they physically destroy everything that could be used to de-anonymize you, leaving with only some kind of public key and a proof of that you work for company X? For the legal part I think there were some countries (IIRC Sweden) that doesn't require to keep any logs so that they can move operations there with an own…

That's a technologist's typical reaction. However, this is not a technical problem. In reality, if Glassdoor did something like that it's just going to increase the likelyhood of getting targeted directly for libel.

Even if someone actually worked for a company, it doesn't mean their statements about it are true. Someone might be disgruntled for a variety of reasons and slander the company, in which case it would be proper to sue in order for the review to be taken down.

The social issue here seems to be that there probably are more companies doing this for "revenge" purposes than for legitimately taking down slander.

Re: Glassdoor not so anonymous

#296

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> It appears a few other companies are doing this too, including Kraken ( https://www.kraken.com/ ) Kraken is still silly for going after them, IMO, but the Kraken case isn't as cut and dry. The person who had left the review on Kraken had accepted a large severance package that was conditional on signing a NDA. I think the bad PR Kraken got for going after them wasn't worth it (especially as the review wasn't really…

NDAs are sometimes not in the public interest and should be violated in those cases.

NDAs have got nothing to do with public interest whatsoever.

If you disagree with what the NDA covers, don't sign the NDA.

Re: Glassdoor not so anonymous

#297
post #149

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> If so, is this legal? If it’s a company provided laptop then it’s a good idea to assume that every keystroke, DNS request, and network packet is fair game. Laptops are cheap. There’s no reason to mix personal and corporate usage.

This is an interesting question post-pandemic where the network the laptop is using may be an employees home network, especially if there is some kind of active scanning involved.

Every home router should make it easy for people to create separate VLANs for work to protect against this.

Re: Glassdoor not so anonymous

#298

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I mean, they’re gonna have to spend a hell of a lot more on recruiting now that the Streisand effect has kicked in.

I think Glassdoor being member access only limits Streisand effect a lot.

It does, unlike you try to sue people and your company is plastered all over the news

Re: Glassdoor not so anonymous

#299

Why you should never leave Glassdoor reviews using; - Your real name - Your real email address - Your real salary and job title - Your normal vocabulary and idioms - Any of your devices (as in, go to an internet cafe or something) They can deanonymize as much as they like all they're going to find is that "dbcooper42069[at]hotmail", using non-region specific language, took a very dim view of company X's management st…

I've never used glassdoor myself, but don't you need to use your company email while leaving the review to prove you actually work there, so leaving an anonymous review isn't even possible? Why would anybody use glassdoor if that's the case?

Re: Glassdoor not so anonymous

#300

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I've heard some pretty simultaneously funny and Orwellian stories about this, mostly about people being fired for looking at porn using work laptops and the specific porn they were looking at. Don't use work computers to look at porn, your employers already know about it.

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I'm as sex positive as they come but even I think it'd be pretty dumb to have pornhub pop up while you're sharing your screen in a meeting or something
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