[nevon]

The company I work for has a similar, yet even worse instance of this. The employee satisfaction survey was advertised as anonymous, but when I looked into the implementation they were just hashing the email address, of which there were only a few thousand. A more conspiratorial mind would conclude that it is to easily be able to find who a particular piece of feedback came from, but in this case I legitimately think it's just incompetence and not being able to figure out a better way of ensuring each employee can only submit the survey once.

This year it's advertised as confidential, rather than anonymous, so I suppose that is an improvement.

[rented_mule]

Not calling it anonymous is an improvement. Before I retired, I read many "anonymous" surveys taken by my reports. Any free-form text in the survey that goes beyond a sentence fragment usually made it obvious who wrote it. At least in the case of my teams, writing styles tended to be pretty distinct, as were the things each person cared about enough to write at any length. I tried to ignore the clues, but it was usually so obvious that it jumped out at me. The people administering such things insisted that anonymous meant their name wasn't on it, so it was fair to call it that.

[chii]

A lot of people simply imagines that anonymity means un-identifiable. It's far from true, but i think some are honestly making the mistake, rather than being nefarious.