Is my company being deceptive on anonymous information gathering [closed]

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I have got an email from my company yesterday, kindly requesting to participate in an anonymous survey.

I have opened up the survey; and it consisted of some rather bold questions. Each questions had a scale of 1 to 5. 1 being "Completely Disagree" and 5 being "Completely Agree"

Some of the very questionable examples from the question set (XXXX is the company name):

I wouldn't work for XXXX, if I could find another job 
I wouldn't feel any kind of obligation to XXXX if I leave XXXX today
I don't leave XXXX because I can't find any better alternative

Obviously, you would not want any supervisor or HR representative to overhear when you discuss such topics, or you would not even discuss these in the office environment at all.

Now what unsettles me (and the most WTF-worthy) was the first question:

In an effort to improve the Process Management in XXXX, and to better analyze the results; we kindly require you to write 3rd, 5th and 8th characters of both of your grandmothers first and last name combined. So that we can map these surveys results to the future surveys.

So if your mother of your fathers name is Dana Scully, and mother of your mothers name is Clarice Starling, you would write N,S,L - A,I,S

To my absent-mindedness and the time being too early in the morning. I truthfully answered all questions!

Then it hit me. In my country you have to provide your 1st degree relatives identity information to a company. And if you know (the company does) Social Identity Number of a person; you can easily find out their names and their 1st degree relative's names.

Basically, now my company can easily tie my survey results to me and I feel trolled or social-engineered or whatever...

How to react in future if they bring up these surveys in an effort to put pressure on me? Can they really use or map these results although they explicitly expressed anonymity at the top of this survey ?

EDIT: It was through an online, 3rd party surveying site. The survey was available to everyone with the link. I have completed the survey from my phone which was on carrier network (3g) and did not have any company proxy/vpn settings.

manpreet 2 years ago

How to react in future if they bring up these surveys in an effort to put pressure on me?

In the extremely unlikely event that the company brings up your survey answers, just deny that they were yours.

It cannot be proven that mapping characters this way produces unique results for everyone.

Can they really use or map these results although they explicitly expressed anonymity at the top of this survey ?

I suppose it's possible to map the results to individuals. And depending on the laws of your locale, and the written assurances of privacy on the survey, the company may or may not be legally permitted to do so.

But, at least in my experience, it's extremely unlikely they would do so. There are easier ways for a company to gather such information quietly if they chose to do so. I suspect you are worrying unnecessarily.

In the future, if you are suspicious of these anonymous surveys, you could simply choose not to participate. (Of course, if they were actually gathering clandestine answers, then they could also know that you didn't participate.)