Some updates on Glassdoor's privacy violations:

Use https://help.glassdoor.com/s/privacyrequest?language=en_US to request deletion of your data. Deactivating your account doesn't delete data. This might not either (no way to verify), but it's the strongest request you can make.

Media coverage: Ars Technica: Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent, Wired: Glassdoor wants to know your real name. The Ars story is more detailed. (Edited to add: see comments for more media links.)

It seems that Glassdoor updated its terms of use on February 17, 2024. I did not receive email notification (my last TOS update from them was December 2022). Some salient bits from the current version:

We may update your Profile with information we obtain from third parties. We may also use personal data you provide to us via your resume(s) or our other services. You can read more about how we collect and process your data in our Privacy Policy.

I never provided a resume. I never typed my name into their site, nor did I use a social-media or Google identity. I created the account with an email address (~10 years ago). That part about "obtain from third parties" means they can try to match you up with LinkedIn, use your email headers if you should ever send them email, try to reconcile your account with Indeed if you're there (the same company owns both Glassdoor and Indeed), and whatever else they come up with.

Also, sometimes the information they add is incorrect. From Ars Technica:

As Monica's blog spread widely online, another Glassdoor user, Josh Simmons, commented to confirm that Glassdoor had "already auto-populated details" on his account, too. But instead of correcting Simmons' information, Glassdoor seemed to be adding mistakes to his profile.

Simmons, who requested to use his real name and share his employer information, is a managing director of Matrix.org Foundation. He discovered that Glassdoor had not only messed up his employer's name but also claimed that he was based in London, while he is actually located in California.

"It was bizarre, because I had never provided that information, and it was a somewhat incoherent mix of details," Simmons told Ars.

Back to the terms of use:

We may attempt to verify your employment history or status through various methods, including third party integrations or services. We may also utilize signals we receive from your current or former employer. Glassdoor is not responsible to you or any third party if we are unable to or inaccurately verify your employment history or status.

I don't know what "we may utilize signals we receive from your employer" means, but it sure sounds like "we might ask your employer if you work there", because your employer knowing you've posted Glassdoor reviews to prompt that question would be a "you" problem, not a "Glassdoor" problem.

(This information is repeated in the privacy policy.)

In order to provide you with access to features across our services, we may create and link different services’ accounts for you.

This is the part about them automatically creating a Fishbowl (social media) account on your behalf, without you explicitly doing anything and apparently without direct notification.

A portion of your Profile on our community and conversation services (e.g., Fishbowl and community and conversation features across our services) is always public. Therefore, your profile picture, company name, title, and other general information (but not including your semi-/anonymous Content submissions) will be visible to the public and available via search.. Content submitted with semi-/anonymous identifiers such as your company name or job title is not associated with the publicly-visible portion of your Profile.

So they added my name to my Glassdoor profile without consent, then propagated that to Fishbowl, and the Fishbowl profile was public?!

Glassdoor responded to Ars:

"We vigorously defend our users’ right to anonymous free speech and will appear in court to oppose and defeat requests for user information," Glassdoor's spokesperson said. "In fact, courts have almost always ruled in favor of Glassdoor and its users when we’ve fought to protect their anonymity. With the addition of Fishbowl’s community features to Glassdoor, our commitment to user privacy remains ironclad, and we will continue to defend our users from employers who seek to unmask their identity."

They "vigorously defend" privacy, yet they collect and store information that violates privacy. Also, note that what they're saying is that they'll defend outside requests for data ("almost" always successfully), but they say nothing about their own proactive use of that data -- like selling it to employers.

That data-deletion link once again: https://help.glassdoor.com/s/privacyrequest?language=en_US.

My employer got bought (again) about a year ago, so we're being moved onto a new benefits setup as of January 1. This means new health insurance (with new prices, sigh...). We were told we'd get our ID cards in December. I have an appointment in early January that would be a pain to reschedule, so I've been watching for these.

Today I received physical mail, but instead of cards, it contained a piece of paper telling me my plan ID # and a URL where I can request cards or print my own.

They sent me paper to tell me how to request paper, instead of just sending the actual paper I needed.

After creating an account (another set of hoops, elided) I saved PDF copies, but I also asked for physical cards because paper probably won't stay in good shape in a wallet for a year. But this was unnecessarily complicated. I also hit a stupid limit: you can make one request per day, but both my medical and dental insurance are now with this carrier, that's two cards, and there was no way to request all cards. I requested the first, which was apparently successful, and when I requested the second I was told I couldn't.

The letter I got suggested I could use "digital cards", meaning download an image on my phone and skip the paper entirely, to "save space in my wallet" (not a concern, since I'm replacing this year's cards!). But my healthcare providers always want to hold the cards, sometimes keeping them for a while so they can do data entry at their convenience during my visit, and I'm not handing over my phone for that. My phone stays with me or, at worst, within my sight and otherwise locked. So paper it is.

I don't know if I'm abnormal or the insurance provider didn't think through their security model (maybe both). They sure didn't think through their model of what's convenient for users or lower-waste for the planet. By the time this is done they will, it appears, have sent me three separate pieces of physical mail.

Somebody on Twitter asked:

What did you learn in 2020 (besides how to make bread)?

I responded there:

• To grow food in pots.
• To cut men's hair.
• To cook more new things.
• That my cat loves me being home all the time.
• More about community-building.
• How to set up a nonprofit foundation.
• To cut people w/no morals or human decency out of my life.
• And yes, sourdough.

I was up against a character limit there, but I'm not here.

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, when staying at home was just starting to happen, I remember somebody asking: what will you do with this gift of time? I've had that in mind for most of the year. I miss seeing my coworkers, but I gained close to an hour back each work day in not commuting, and I gained a lot of flexibility. My team tries to work mostly normal hours for the sake of collaboration, but everybody recognizes that people have other demands on their attention too. The parents trying to work while their kids are at home attending school via Zoom gave me the opportunity to attend that mid-day (virtual) class or non-work meeting, and the flexibility to tend to things around the house while working. As one small example, sourdough -- it's a two-day process that doesn't require a lot of attention at any one time, but requires availability that wouldn't have been possible were I going to the office every day. Before this year, bread came from a store/bakery or out of a bread machine, only.

Both of us working from home is sometimes frustrating when one or the other of us has meetings, but we're also spending more time together throughout the day and that's very nice. We eat lunch together, every day, in addition to dinner. Sure, this means I'm not making things that I like but he doesn't (that I would have normally made for lunches at the office), but on the other hand, because I'm not limited to things that pack well, we're eating better, I think. Not always healthy, but less crap, more stuff made from scratch. I even grew some of it, which was new to me.

I only cut his hair the once. He held off for a long time back in the spring, thinking it would be possible to see a barber soon, but soon kept moving. He did a lot of it himself; I did the parts he couldn't see or reach. Men's hair technology sure is different from women's.

At the beginning of the year the evil deeds from people who should know better at Stack Exchange were still doing a lot of damage. It wasn't just what they did to me; they did some other nasty, bone-headed things early in 2020 and then throughout the year. A couple of the employees they drove out shared some things publicly after. (Pro tip: don't fire someone who knows about your dirty laundry without securing an NDA.) The folks there are majorly screwed up, and a couple of people I once thought decent folks in bad situations have shown themselves to be lacking in ethics and human decency. I'm well to be rid of their lies and malice.

Frustrating as it was to lose some good communities there, I've spent this year working to build the next generation at Codidact, and I'm very happy with where we are. We're building an open-source platform for Q&A and so much more, learning from those who have come before and building things that serve communities better. While our all-volunteer team is small and that limits us sometimes, we're flexible and responsive and working with our communities, and that shows. We have about a dozen communities up and running on our network now (including Judaism, yay! with some folks from Mi Yodeya), with more to come. Some of them are doing some novel things that weren't possible Somewhere Else. I'm the Community Lead, and while I had a fair bit of experience as a moderator on communities with varying characteristics, this role has allowed me to stretch and learn even more. It turns out this role makes me the most logical person to do "product management" and bug/feature prioritization and a fair bit of QA, too. Cool!

I'm now a board member; The Codidact Foundation was incorporated in November as a non-profit (I just got the confirmation letter from Companies House this week) and we'll now seek charity status. As soon as we can get a bank in pandemic times to let us open an account we'll be able to take donations and presumably get ourselves some better servers. This is all very exciting for me, and it's neat to be working with a worldwide team with quite a mix of backgrounds. Our major contributors include students and software developers and an ambulance dispatcher and a soldier and an accountant, among others.

Don't get me wrong; 2020 has been terrible in many ways. People close to me have died and I couldn't even be with or hug people, just be on Zoom. Friends and one family member are dealing with health challenges. The pandemic has greatly impeded my congregation (and so many others!). Nearly a year of not being able to socialize, go to restaurants, take in entertainment, hold conventions, attend Shabbat services, or do "normal life things" is wearing. Knowing that it's going to be at least many more months is sobering. (I'm going to call it now: I think Pennsic will be either cancelled again or severely hobbled and small.)

I'm glad to have the kind of job I can do from home; many people don't. And something I left off of that list on Twitter: I've learned how to work from home pretty effectively. I'd like some more human contact in three dimensions, but when (let's say "when", not "if") the pandemic is finally under some degree of control, I'll be able to get that from places other than work. I've learned more solidly that I could handle working for a company that's all-remote -- I suspected as much when I applied for such a position a few years back, but now I've seen it. And my employer has learned that remote works too; finally most of our engineering positions are now listed as "anywhere" instead of just the two cities in which we have engineering teams.

On the larger scale, 2020 has been a year of plague and violence and tyranny and unrest and hate and division. In the much smaller scale here at Chez Cellio, there has been good along with the bad, and I'm thankful for them.

Working from home seems to be mostly going ok for my company. We have several standing "coffee break" video chats each week for the human connection and are using video more for other meetings. We have learned how to add custom background images to Microsoft Teams and this is a source of amusement. (I would like to find some from Babylon 5, particularly images from (a) Minbar and (b) inside the station, but have had no luck so far.) My team has a new person who started a few weeks ago, so he started in quarantine and hasn't yet been to the office. I'm his mentor, so I'm trying to make sure he's getting all the support and human connection he needs. The situation seems roughest on the people who live alone, though the ones with small children at home have challenges too. I'm fortunate to have Dani and the cat.

I have read a little more fiction than usual, some of it made available for free by authors because of the quarantine. Thank you! One that I just finished is Dragon of Glass by Zoe Chant, a delightful, lightweight novel about a transplant from another world and the woman who released him; watching him try to fit into our world is a lot of fun. Tor is making the Murderbot novellas available this week for free (leading up to a novel release next month); I'd read the first a while back but hadn't read the others yet, so this is good timing. I also have a gift waiting from a Kickstarter for a different book (while you're waiting and stuck at home, here...). I also just read (not free) The Body in the Building, a novella by a friend and fellow SE refugee. The point-of-view character is an architect who discovers problems with a major project, and then discovers that those problems were only the tip of an iceberg of bigger problems... I figured out the mystery before the reveal but also fell for some misdirection, so neither too easy nor too hard.

I have been spending more time in the kitchen. Yes I'm cooking all our meals at home aside from very occasional takeout from local restaurants, but also: with the food supply being sometimes erratic, I've upped the produce deliveries and am doing some low-key preserving. I've never canned and don't have the equipment, but I'm pickling things (to refrigerate, not shelf-stable). So far I've pickled eggs, beets, cauliflower, and jalapenos, and will do some carrots next. I also plan to dry some fruit, dried fruit not requiring refrigeration. (I'm trying to keep the fridge full.) I haven't been able to get bread flour since Pesach ended, so I guess I'll try making bread with all-purpose flour. (Also haven't been able to get rye flour.) I would like to get some more seedlings for container gardening, but I don't know if I want to go to Home Depot for them and nobody delivers. (Insert rant about how Home Depot gets to sell plants because they sell stuff for home repair, but local nurseries had to close.)

Someone I know indirectly from Mi Yodeya suggested a book and a series of videos on Reb Nachman that look very personally relevant. (I've read one chapter of the book and seen one of the videos so far; more soon.) I joined an online talmud class (by R' Ethan Tucker of Hadar). A friend pointed out to me that since we're all stuck at home anyway, synagogues in other cities are just as available to me as my local ones. There's one in DC that seems like a good fit for me. Closer to home, my synagogue's two rabbis and cantor each hold a weekly open chat on Zoom, so I'll get to see my rabbi that way tomorrow.

Our choir director sends out daily music selections with accompanying (short) history essays. I'm enjoying these.

I have barely watched any TV.

Yesterday, a delivery person came to our office door asking if so-and-so worked here -- he had a package that omitted the company name, so he wasn't sure where to deliver it. The package did have the suite number on it, which got him to the right floor, but he helpfully pointed out that none of the doors in our building actually have numbers posted on them. Huh! He's right!

After he left, I took a post-it note and a marker, wrote "suite #" on it (with our number), and stuck it to the wall next to the door at eye height. (The door itself has a company name at eye height.) That was a patch.

Today someone else printed a sign with a nice, large font and taped it to the door under the name, taping on all four edges to increase its durability. That was a fix.

If somebody else decides to make it pretty, with a splash of color and art, that will be marketing excess. :-)

I visited our main office for a few days this past week. (Sorry to folks I didn't connect with.) I met our two new team members, one of whom is our new manager, and our intern for this coming summer, and I had lots of productive conversations. I also played one game of Caverna with coworkers.

I wondered what airport security was going to be like given the government shutdown. Monday morning in Pittsburgh the line was probably about 15-20 minutes long, but somebody came by to tell us the alternate checkpoint was open and had no line, so some of us went there. All of the agents I saw were polite, professional, and not acting disgruntled. I and several other passengers thanked them for being there despite the situation. Everybody there understood that the mess was not the fault of anybody there and taking out frustrations on the wrong people would be bad. Yay for people acting like adults!

Thursday night at Logan, the first checkpoint I found was closed but the second was staffed. It took me five minutes to get through. Again, people behaved themselves.

Wednesday afternoon our new writer and I took a walk through a park/wetlands area near the office. We saw lots of ducks and one heron. We later saw the heron catch a small mouse; I hadn't previously known that they ate mammals.

( photos )

On the job front there have been ups and downs but the year ended on an up. After thrashing about earlier in the year, being moved from one short-term or ill-defined task to another while people juggled charge codes and contracts, I finally got to settle into something (a) interesting and (b) that takes advantage of my particular specialty, and I rocked. I got a new manager mid-year (my first remote one, too; he's in AZ), which always carries some uncertainty, but he and I really click. He specifically appreciates what I do and wants to help me find more opportunities to do it. Excellent!

The cats have settled in well. I was only without cats for about 4.5 months, but they felt really empty. I mean, Dani's and my relationship is strong (no worries there!), but there was still something missing. That Erik, Embla, and Baldur all died within a span of 10 months (and the last on the day I returned from a frustrating trip to Israel) may have had something to do with that.

I continue to really enjoy my job as a moderator on Mi Yodeya, and last winter I was also appointed as a moderator on Writers (both Stack Exchange sites). On both sites I get to work with great teams on interesting content. I'm still trying to figure out how to increase the tech-writing content on Writers. I need to ask and perhaps self-answer some questions to nudge things along, I suspect.

2013 was a terrible year on another Stack Exchange site. What was supposed to be an academic-style biblical-studies site turned into a cesspool of Christian dogma. I know it's possible for people of different religions to have civilized, respectful discussions about the bible (and other religious matters); I've seen it. (I have thoughts on what makes it work when it works, but I'll save that for another time.) This site was supposed to be non-religious (though obviously most of its members are religious), like a secular university. But it didn't work out that way, and the evangelical moderators (there's no diversity on that team) either can't see or don't care about the damage being done. Everything I did to try to help get things back on course was thrown in my face -- with personal attacks, offensive (usually anti-Jewish) posts, and assorted misrepresentation. So I'm done with that; I have better things to do with my energy. There are a few good people there who are trying to turn some things around; I wish them much luck, but personally, I'm done.

I've had ups and downs religiously and congregationally. My rabbi is fantastic and I like my congregation, but there have been changes in how we approach services, and too many weeks I just don't go on Friday night because they're doing something kid-oriented or entitled (sisterhood service, Reform-style bar mitzvah, etc), and that's frustrating. The Shabbat morning minyan continues to be excellent and the spiritual high point of my week, so that's all good. I'm just trying to figure out Friday nights, and some of it is bound up in questions about whether the Reform movement is right for me at all (except I have this fantastic rabbi and he's worth staying for). It's just that sometimes, being rather more observant than those around me and caring about the halachic and other details that most shrug off, I feel like a mutant.

This year was the last Darkover Con, so On the Mark re-assembled to do a concert. That was fun, and it was nice to see friends I haven't seen in a while at the con.

I'm sure there's more, but this is what I've got right now. Happy 2014 all!