Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

#31

Post by eecc »

randomcarbloke wrote: post #28
klabb3 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it illegal in the US for an employer to share your compensation data with third parties? Or do they skirt the rules by “anonymizing” it? > we live in a culture of "we shouldn't talk about compensation." Yeah especially now that the cat is out of the bag, but restricted to employers. Such a data set should absolutely be made available to workers. Information symmetry is critical for a functioning market. And cap…

If I think I get paid more than you in the same role it's absolutely in my interest to keep that information from you. With departmental budgets in mind, you receiving a raise may limit the total compensation available to me when I negotiate my own.

Ever heard of the allegory “I capponi di Renzo” from the Promessi Sposi novel by Alessandro Manzoni? Look it up

Re: Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

#32

Post by [deleted] »

randomcarbloke wrote: post #28
klabb3 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it illegal in the US for an employer to share your compensation data with third parties? Or do they skirt the rules by “anonymizing” it? > we live in a culture of "we shouldn't talk about compensation." Yeah especially now that the cat is out of the bag, but restricted to employers. Such a data set should absolutely be made available to workers. Information symmetry is critical for a functioning market. And cap…

If I think I get paid more than you in the same role it's absolutely in my interest to keep that information from you. With departmental budgets in mind, you receiving a raise may limit the total compensation available to me when I negotiate my own.

[deleted]

Re: Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

#33

Post by misja111 »

wisienkas wrote: post #22

Can anyone summarize how this breaks or does not break european GDPR?

Excellent question. I would say that this breaks GDPR principle #2, 'purpose limitation'. See e.g. https://www.cyberpilot.io/cyberpilot-blog/data-protection-pr....

Re: Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

#34

Post by earnesti »

Sardtok wrote: post #27
hayst4ck wrote: post #16

Glassdoor is a completely flawed premise. Employers have almost complete compensation data and because we value anonymity more than ability to negotiate, our data is flawed. Employers might well directly know what you got paid at your previous company. Many companies are able to purchase previous employment salary data, which I believe Equifax sells directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753 Here is a gr…

In Norway you can lookup anyone's tax information. You can see who looks up your tax information, though, it is publicly available as long as you log on to government sites. So basically everyone's salary from two years back is public information. It is often used by the press to check how much the richest people pay in taxes (or rather how badly they contribute by dodging taxes). I've never heard of employers using…

> I've never heard of employers using it to check candidates' salaries, though. They usually just ask as part of the interview process.

As a Scandinavian employer, I can tell you that the tax records are very useful. Especially for higher-end roles it is very nice being able to check how much people have been earning from a reliable data source. I'm pretty sure many are using that a lot.

Re: Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

#35

Post by mcculley »

hayst4ck wrote: post #16

Glassdoor is a completely flawed premise. Employers have almost complete compensation data and because we value anonymity more than ability to negotiate, our data is flawed. Employers might well directly know what you got paid at your previous company. Many companies are able to purchase previous employment salary data, which I believe Equifax sells directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753 Here is a gr…

It isn’t just your employers that are selling your compensation. Many give copies of W-2 and paystubs to companies that loan them money (e.g., for mortgages and auto loans). Some of these companies then sell this data to aggregators.

Re: Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

#36

Post by hayst4ck »

eecc wrote: post #31
randomcarbloke wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I think I get paid more than you in the same role it's absolutely in my interest to keep that information from you. With departmental budgets in mind, you receiving a raise may limit the total compensation available to me when I negotiate my own.

Ever heard of the allegory “I capponi di Renzo” from the Promessi Sposi novel by Alessandro Manzoni? Look it up

> “i capponi di Renzo”, has become a proverbial admonition in Italian culture

> Renzo is carrying these poor capons (castrated male chicken) as his only means of payment to a well-off city lawyer, whom Renzo intends to hire... Manzoni (the author) notes that, had the capons been a little more intelligent, they would have started picking the hand that kept them captive, therefore regaining their freedom. Instead, the capons fought among themselves and ended up being delivered with great ease to their recipient.

Re: Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

#37

Post by AlienRobot »

Classic mistake. This is why you should never type your real name into a website that you don't wan

>One user, who goes by Monica, wrote in a post on her personal blog that Glassdoor added her name and the city where she lives to her Glassdoor profile following an email exchange with Glassdoor customer support, despite having never provided her name during the sign-up process some years earlier

Wait, what.

This is just grotesque and unethical. You do NOT go around fixing other people's profiles. You do NOT edit other people's posts. This is a huge breach of trust for any platform that handles user inputted information.

Re: Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

#38

Post by dang »

Employer Review Site Glassdoor Deanonymized Users Without Consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39785815 - March 2024 (18 comments)

Glassdoor added real names to supposedly anonymous profiles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777752 - March 2024 (23 comments)

Glassdoor is now adding real names to user profiles without consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39769166 - March 2024 (40 comments)

Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39761176 - March 2024 (31 comments)

Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39705788 - March 2024 (310 comments)

Re: Users say Glassdoor added real names to user profiles without their consent

#40

Post by Jenk »

tbdenney wrote: post #24

As a marketer who helped manage various companies' reputation online, I can tell you that Glassdoor is pay-to-play. If you pay them the subscription fee, and you get negative reviews, whether "true" or not, you can challenge most and get them removed. I thought most people would understand their business model explicitly relies on getting companies to pay a fee to own their page (and in turn they have to keep those c…

I can confirm this experience. At a previous job the management team (of which I was a member) would regularly review glassdoor reviews as part of our employee and candidate feedback. We had a healthy attitude toward employee satisfaction, but someone noticed you can flag a review as disputed (or "under review" or whatever the term is) and whilst it remains in this state, it is hidden from search results. Even for what I considered a team with a good attitude toward company culture, the temptation was too much and it soon became standard practice to flag every negative review asap. Some were unflagged after we reviewed them and we literally couldn't dispute the review but lots were just left as flagged.

The same practice is true of yelp and tripadvisor reviews.

They are cyber-racketeers.

Post reply on HN