zlacker

>>dale_h+(OP)
Pointy-haired boss: "According to the anonymous online employee survey, you don't trust management. What's up with that?"

<Dilbert looks back with a blank stare>

---

Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.

>>CSMast+hf
I actually had this happen back in high school. The teacher gave us “anonymous” surveys to gauge her performance. She analyzed the handwriting to determine which one was mine. I actively tried to change my handwriting as well, but I guess not well enough. I’ve never trusted a survey was actually anonymous after that.

>>al_bor+Dh
We've been tasked by a client for 2 years to create an anonymized survey, and my mind has gone to great lengths to devise a survey where even our own employees (or superusers with full DB access) cannot figure out who a respondent is.

It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this.

But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)

>>atonse+ZC
I built a suggestion box for a team at work like this. It was pretty basic. The page had no login, and no tracking of any kind. The DB only had an index, the date, and the suggestion. The source was available to everyone who would use it, and if they wanted I would have shown them the DB. These people also had root access to the server it ran on, so if they were really paranoid they could clear any system logs. The site was also heavily used for the day to day work, so the noise from everyone on the page would obscure any ability to tie a single IP to a time stamp without a lot of effort and a large chance for error.

Over the course of 4 years I think it was only used 3 times. Most people assumed it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, I genuinely wanted honest feedback, and thought some people were too shy to speak up in a group setting, so wanted to give options.

>>al_bor+Q41
> Most people assumed it was some kind of trap.

In most of the places I've worked, I would have assumed the same.

The thing is that there is no real technological solution that would instill trust in someone that doesn't already have trust. In the end, all such privacy solutions necessarily must boil down to "trust us" because it's not practical or reasonable to perform the sort of deep analysis that would be required to confirm privacy claims.

You may have provided the source, for instance, but that doesn't give reassurance that the binary that is executing was compiled from that source.