Personal Data We Process and How We Use It

We process personal data in order to provide our services. The personal data we collect from and about you will vary depending on how you interact with our services. We also change our services from time to time, so your options for providing us with personal data may also change. You aren’t required to provide us with personal data. However, if you don’t share certain data with us, we may not be able to provide you with our services or respond to your requests.

We May Collect the Following Categories of Personal Data

How We May Use Personal Data

Advertising (On & Off the Services)

We may use your personal data to enable our advertising, advertising for our customers (including job and display ads), and sponsored Content.

• We may use personal data we collect from you, our affiliates, and third parties to personalize ads for our services as well as ads available on our services. 
• We may also use data we collect via our services and third-party ad partners (including affiliates) to measure the effectiveness of ads and to help recognize your device(s) to serve you ads on and off of our services. Some of our ad partners may also enable us to collect similar data directly from their website or app by integrating our or our affiliates advertising technology.
• Personal data shared by ad partners and affiliates or collected by us from the websites and apps of ad partners and affiliates may be combined with the other data you share with us and that we receive, generate, or infer about you, as described in this Policy.
• If you respond to ads posted by third parties or submit data to third parties via the services, these third parties receive data about you subject to their respective privacy policies.

Creating an Account & Profile

You will need to create an account and provide personal data to access most of our services. 

• In order to provide you with access to features across our services, we may create and link different service accounts for you.
• If you sign up or into our services with a third-party service, that service may share your personal data with us, such as your name and email address. You control the personal data you authorize to be shared with us via your third-party service accounts.
• When you set up an account on our services, we create a member “Profile” for you that includes the personal data you provide. We may update your Profile with data we obtain from third parties or extract from your resume. We may also use personal data you provide to us via our other services.
• 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 may receive from your current or former employer. 
• Portions of your Profile may be visible to other users and the public, depending on the services you use and the choices you make regarding your anonymity. We may also allow you to share your Profile with third parties or provide you with the ability to change your Profile’s visibility settings in certain circumstances. However, your Profile will not publicly include or link to Your Content submitted semi-/anonymously to our services.

Communicating with Glassdoor & Affiliates

We and our affiliates may send service-related and promotional communications to our users. We and our affiliates may also send promotional communications to prospective users and customers to inform them about our services.

• These communications may be via email, text message, calls, push notifications, direct messages, or otherwise.
  • To opt out of receiving text messages, you must reply “STOP” from the device receiving the messages. 
  • To unsubscribe from emails, please use the unsubscribe or email settings link in the email(s) you receive. If you unsubscribe only from an individual type of email communication (e.g., a particular job alert), you may continue to receive other emails. We may also offer a settings function via our services to manage your email preferences. 
  • To turn off push notifications, use in-app and/or operating system settings on your device. 
• Unless you choose to delete your account(s), you cannot unsubscribe from certain communications that are required as part of your use of our services (e.g., communications about changes to this Policy.)
• If you use our chat feature, we and our service providers may record your chats and keep transcripts.

Communications with, or Initiated by, Third Parties

We may allow users or customers to invite prospective users to our services. For example, we may allow them to invite prospective users to join a group, submit Content, or create an account. In order to do so, we may process the invitation’s contents and the invitee’s contact information. We may allow you to sync or upload a list of contacts in order to facilitate these communications. 

Communicating with Other Users

We may offer users the ability to communicate with each other. Users you interact with can see what you send them; if you send a message, the recipient can read your message and potentially share it outside of our services. You should never share more information than you are comfortable with.

Demographic Data

We may allow you to provide us with your demographic data. You can also update or remove previously supplied demographic data. If you provide your demographic data, we will use it across our services, including to:

• Provide insights into wage discrepancies (e.g., showing gender and racial/ethnic wage gap disparities)
• Provide demographic-based analysis of jobs, companies, and Content (e.g., we may utilize demographic data to generate reports highlighting employers that best embrace diversity, support specific groups or rights, or minimize wage gaps.)
• Provide diversity, equity, and inclusion metrics and ratings (e.g., provide insights for users who want to learn more about diversity, equity, and inclusion with respect to specific industries or companies)
• Provide search and filtering features (e.g., providing users the ability to filter Content or companies based on certain employer qualities or employee experiences and demographic attributes. As users provide demographic data, their Content may be associated with aggregated categories, such as filtering for all the ethnicities for a particular company/industry/group. In some instances, particular Content may be directly tagged with user demographic attributes.)
• Enhance employer/employee diversity disclosures for our users and the public (e.g., we may allow employers to share internal demographic data, diversity program details, and testimonials from their own employees; we may provide opportunities for users and employees to engage in discussions regarding demographic-related topics)
• Personalize recommendations and ads for job ads and offerings (e.g., help companies enhance the visibility of their jobs for veterans)

We take precautions to help prevent your demographic data from inadvertently revealing your identity on our services. For example, where there aren’t a sufficient number of user submissions, we may limit the visibility of certain demographic attributes to ensure we don’t inadvertently disclose sufficient information about a particular user’s personal attributes to make them identifiable. While we take your anonymity extremely seriously, and make our best efforts to ensure that demographic data doesn’t inadvertently lead to your identification, there are instances in which user identification or demographic data disclosure may occur.

• Users are free to self-identify in the Content they submit or in the communications they send.
• In order to provide a voice and agency to those who, regardless of the risks of identification, affirmatively wish to have their opinions and experiences heard, we may provide an option for users to opt into the disclosure of their demographic data in a manner and to an extent that may lead to loss of their anonymity.
• While we try our best to plan for all contingencies, we are not perfect. The preventative measures we take to protect your identity and our service’s technological performance may not always function the way we intend when combined with the complex realities of many millions of unique workplaces and lives into which we have limited, imperfect visibility. As we collect more personal data about our users that will be displayed publicly, there may be instances where the mechanisms we have designed to protect your anonymity aren’t perfect. It is never our intention that your identity be inadvertently revealed, and we take multiple steps to ensure this doesn’t occur. But, in the interests of transparency, we want to be sure you are fully aware of the potential risk of inadvertent identification.

Individuals Featured in Content

We allow users to submit Content that references other users and the public, provided that such Content complies with our Community Guidelines.

• We allow Content that names individuals in the highest positions in a company who have broad influence over the work environment, as long as the Content describes the individual’s behavior or performance at work. Individuals in this category include those who are the public face of the company (e.g., C-Suite, Executive Director, President, Owner, Founder). We believe this information is generally representative of a company’s culture and can be informative to job candidates and the public.
  • We don’t allow Content that includes negative comments about identifiable individuals outside of this group. 
• We may allow Content that mentions demographic attributes about an identifiable person if we believe the Content is used to describe a workplace situation. General discussions of workplace misconduct are allowed, including most discussions of illegal activities, discrimination, and sexual harassment.

Researching & Applying to Jobs

• When you search for information on our services or the services of our affiliates, we may use your searches and other activities on and off our services (including activities conducted on our affiliates’ services or your interactions with ads) to personalize your experience and the jobs we show and recommend to you.
• We may provide you with the ability to submit job applications via our services. We work with our affiliates to provide this service. When you click the “apply” (or a similar) button to submit an application, your application is processed by our affiliates (subject to their respective privacy policies) and sent to the most appropriate contact information we and/or our affiliates have on file for that employer.

Submitting & Interacting with Content

We offer our users a variety of ways to submit and interact with Content. You should only submit Content to the services that you are comfortable sharing with others, including the public.

• Depending on the services you use, we may offer you different options for controlling how your personal data and identity are represented to other users, employers, and the public. 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.
  • When you submit conversational Content such as a post, comment, or question, you may be able to control how you represent yourself using different anonymity options. For example, when using some of our services, you can choose to submit Content with your company name, your job title, or your full name. 
  • When submitting other Content, such as reviews, you may be required to include certain personal data designated for public display, such as your employer, job title, and location. 
  • In some groups, we may allow you to interact with other users
    • We may allow you to make your Profile visible to other members of the group so you can interact.
    • We may allow group leaders to limit access to a group and approve new members. When you request access to a group, your Profile and any answers to member-approval questions may be shared with the leader(s) for that group.
  • We endeavor to offer opportunities to use our services while preserving your anonymity. However, Glassdoor cannot guarantee your anonymity as, depending on your specific situation, the circumstances and information you disclose in your Content, and the semi-/anonymous identifiers you use may allow someone to identify you or narrow down your identity to a small group of people (e.g., employees in a particular department at your company). You should understand this risk before submitting Content to our services.
• We may offer you the ability to join live audio or video conversations. Your audio or video is processed if you choose to participate in the discussion, otherwise, your Profile is included in the listener’s section of the service.
  • Some of the live audio/video events hosted on or through our services may be recorded.
• We may display some linked information in-line on our services via “embeds.” In general, we do not control how third-party services collect data when they serve you their information directly via these embeds. As a result, embedded information is not covered by this Policy but by the policies of the service from which the information is embedded.