Boss holds emergency meeting with all 100 staff demanding that responders to "anonymous" company survey reveal themselves on the spot, turning the ordeal into a humiliation ritual: '​The room was silent except for one new girl who raised her hand'

• The owner was big on controlling everyone's lives and required us to do unpaid trainings and seminars outside of work hours.

  
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  An employee answers a question from the company's owner.

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• Owner turned an "anonymous" company survey into a public loyalty test.

  
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  via Laurin Steffens

  Question marks against a dark background.

• From there, the process of elimination and company politics come into play, and whether or not so-and-so did or didn't submit that brutally honest, raking, negative response doesn't really matter because anyone reading the responses is going to automatically assume that the response came from the person they expect it to. Their own opinions and perspective bias answering the question for them and leading to what, in their mind, is a confirmed supposition because it feels good, and forms a self-supporting reasoning for their worldview.

  This creates problems in workplaces, and I've seen it happen, where someone will be accused of submitting feedback, criticism, or a response that they didn't submit. Heck, they might not have even submitted a response at all.

  But facts are unprovable; it was anonymous after all, so the gossip train starts and eventually can pull into the station of retaliation and reprimand, all of those ironically creating the issues that HR was trying to sniff out with the survey in the first place. 

  That, or you end up with public tribunals like this boss staged, where the reviews and grievances get aired out with submitters being pressured to out themselves.
  
  Hey, for HR, it's a job well done. Now they've got problems to solve for the company, and they can continue to prove the need for their existence.
  
  And this whole traceable tech fear isn't just the same internet phobia like your parents had in the 90s and 2000s when you were just a kid. When you were itching every day after school to explore the wild world of the wide web, they were more hesitant and guarded with their online activity. They'd try to limit your access to keep you from talking to strangers, which, in their mind, would lead directly to you being abducted and practically sucked through the screen of the computer or lead to some sensitive information about you being leaked and living forever somewhere on the internet.

  For them, it was a fear of the unknown; this entirely new concept of being “online” wasn't something they had been raised with, and so it was something that many parents, like mine, approached with extreme caution.

  When laptops became a thing, complete with their own web cams, and suddenly the internet wasn't locked into a specific room of the house on the family computer, suddenly, here was the first device in the house with a built-in camera connected directly to the internet at all times. These first webcam-equipped laptops were practically the first thing in the house, except for maybe a cell phone, that readily came with a built-in camera. 

  My dad would cover the webcam with a piece of tape or paper when he wasn't using it. He still does, too. I used to think that this was insane behaviour. But now, with apps that have been proven to be misusing their permissions to access your phone's camera and microphone to hit you with targeted ads, I can't help but admit that he was right all along. Even tech billionaires like Mark Zukeburg have been shown to be taping over their web cams. And you really can't help but wonder why they would bother if they didn't know something, and surely, they would be the ones to know.

  And it didn't stop with my dad and his web camera. Our parents were, of course, right about it, everything. All of this is here forever… well, at least until someone decides they don't want to pay for the server space to store the data.

  So, what's the point here really? Is this tangent leading somewhere? I guess it's this, right back where we started: Don't trust that something is “anonymous” just because it tells you that it is. Even if there isn't anything that will directly link that submission back to you, it's pretty easy for employers to go through the process of elimination and deduce who submitted each response.

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  An entire company gathers in tense anticipation for what the boss has to say.
  
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