There is a Social Contract with sites and their name policies. Some how companies still don’t really understand this (See what WOW did in 2010) . There is a massive story breaking this week about how GlassDoor a site where people who can create profiles and anonymously rate their employers over their entire careers has really screwed up. It is now collecting people’s “verified names” and storing it with their profiles indefinitely.
This was apparently prompted by their aquisision of a company called Fishbowl a “semi-anonymous professional social network site that allows users to “ask questions without disclosing your name.”” However Fishbowl does require those people who crate accounts to tell the site their real name (but doesn’t disclose this on its profile.
With the merger they gave every GlassDoor user a Fishbowl account – but chose to push the Fishbowl practices of name collection and storage over to Glassdoor. This has spooked Glassdoor users who are now encouraging other users of the site to delete their accounts.
It has been reported in Ars Technica and TechCrunch.