Glassdoor, a site dedicated to anonymous employer reviews and aggregated salary data, is shedding the confidentiality that made it a household name. A handful of Glassdoor users are reportedly finding their real names attached to their reviews after contacting the company for customer support. According to one former Glassdoor user, Glassdoor appears to be pulling users' names from their support requests and then tacking them onto public reviews that are meant to be anonymous.
Monica Cellio, a technical writer and programmer who has used Glassdoor for about a decade, shared her harrowing experience in a blog post last week. The vast majority of Cellio's user experience sounds pretty normal: She signed up for Glassdoor using her email address and used her account to receive job alerts in her area. But after contacting Glassdoor for an "account-related issue" recently, Cellio received a support email. She says replying to the email was a "big mistake."
According to Cellio's blog post (first spotted by Ars Technica), Glassdoor took the name attached to her email response and added it to her user profile. Though the customer service team she communicated with insisted her name would not appear on employer reviews she'd already posted, her real name was still attached to her profile. Not only was it unclear whether her name would then appear on future reviews, but Glassdoor said it had created a "Fishbowl" account on Cellio's behalf—without her consent. Her name was attached to this, too.
Glassdoor acquired Fishbowl, an app made for anonymous employee feedback and work-related discourse, back in 2021. Today, Fishbowl integrations appear as "communities" on Glassdoor's website, where users can allegedly participate in frank and confidential conversations with others from their respective industries. But Glassdoor reportedly told Cellio it could not edit the name attached to her unwanted Fishbowl account and that the only chance she had at removing her identity was to delete the account entirely.
"Your only option is to delete your account," Cellio wrote. "They do not care that this puts people at risk with their employers. They do not care that this seems to run counter to their own data-privacy policies."
Indeed, Glassdoor's privacy policy says if the company has "collected and processed your personal information with your consent, then you can withdraw your consent at any time." It also says you "have the right to object to certain specific uses of your personal data." However, according to Cellio, Glassdoor refused to alter the personal information attached to her profiles. The representative who last emailed Cellio reportedly told her they "stand behind the decision that your name has to be placed on your profile," regardless of whether users "agree" with it.
It's unclear whether Glassdoor is beginning to spread personal information gleaned through its customer service channels across public user profiles. On my end alone, reviews appear to remain anonymous. But this doesn't mean reviews published under name-attached profiles in the future will be made identifiable. As Cellio pointed out, headlines are rife with "ample evidence that anybody with a juicy online database can be hacked, and the mere presence of that involuntary data was a problem." On a platform known for its anonymity, it's fair that users would expect their identities to be protected.
Concerned for their privacy, users are now leaving Glassdoor in droves. "I just went through and removed all the stuff I ever posted there and deleted my account," one X user posted Wednesday. "Y’all should probably do the same." A Reddit user said they deleted an account they "didn't even know" they had.
