[overfeed]

> Considering it was anonymous

In the recent past, my department received an email from on high with a list of people who were yet to complete the "anonymous" survey.

I always assume my work-survey answers are traceable back to me, whether it's via self-doxxing with my answers, tracing links of the rootkit-level MDM software that can record my screen, but they pinky-promise to only use for remote assistance, in case I open a ticket with IT.

[andy99]

Talked to someone at a large company who had admin access to survey results (require to do some analytics). The survey was “anonymous” but results were geo-located, and had some information about the team they came from, which in many cases was enough to clearly identify people. There is a difference between “doesn’t have a persons name on it” anonymous and actually anonymized in a way hardened against figuring out who is who. I don’t think anyone really does the latter.

[jpc0]

You do know it is possible for the answers to be anonymous but who submitted to be tracked?

[iinnPP]

Depends on how it's done.

Trusting that process to be done well is probably not the greatest plan.

[HumblyTossed]

I have taken some really badly (on purpose?) written questionnaires in the past. Asking about team size, role, etc.

That’s not anonymous at that point. That’s an agenda.

[overfeed]

I've seen questions asking for my org, team size, role, and when I joined, and thought it would have saved me time had they asked for my employee number instead.

[close04]

Most external survey providers claimed anonymity but in their T&Cs stated in a very roundabout way that they could provide some information to customers for quality purposes or something. Read “we’ll deanonymize some users if the paying customer wants it”. Internal survey tools are subject to internal management pressure.

Even when you use a tool like Microsoft Forms, where MS really can’t be bothered to deanonimize users unless 3 letter agencies get involved, it’s still possible to do timestamp matching between the proxy/VPN logs and the submission time.

Asume real anonymity only if the URL is the same for everyone and you can fill the survey from any computer on the internet.

But the explanation for why people overhype AI usage is probably simpler. They want to keep their license because it’s a nice perk. They’ll use it to get the gist of a long email thread without bothering the read the details, to get some meeting minutes without validating if that was actually what was said, to generate some crappy modern equivalent of wordart graphics for their presentations, and feel like the time saved to generate what most time is slop was worth it.

When I worked on this (outside of coding) it was a pain to find a use case that really benefited. These were all niche uses that fit an LLM like a glove. These rest was slop, I could see the usage reports, and the BS self reporting surveys. Everyone inflated the numbers and usage to justify keeping their license.

[DrewADesign]

You do know it’s possible for insecure leaders to lie about things like that, and that there’s no possible way to definitively tell beforehand?

[Survey8430]

This guy is wrong.

[hennell]

It's perfectly possible. Two tables, one stores answer responses only, the other just marks off who has responded. No link between them and you have anonymous data but can tell who hasn't responded.

Of course if you record created/updated timestamps on both, insert both records in the same order, accidently record the user code in the response data, take backups in between responses, have identifying questions or just don't have that many people responding it's easy/not hard to reverse engineer.

But it's quite possible to do right, I did it quite effectively almost by mistake years ago. Sent a customer survey out with generated codes as identifiers recorded with answers. Before sending reminder emails a script grabbed the codes, marked the customer as responded and wiped the code (so I could just get future responses where code was not null to mark next people off). Although I had timestamps the script meant customers were updated in blocks, there really wasn't any data to link them.

I know because the Boss was not happy he couldn't find out which customer had said what, and I had to point out all the communication (with customers and me) called it an anonymous survey, so why would I have saved them?

So it is possible, just not easy even if you intend it, and it's often not intentional...

I don't trust anonymous surveys either now...

[Survey8430]

The way I see it:

If the participant has to trust the survey creator, then it is not anonymous. The survey creator can link the data.

If the survey creator has to trust the participant, the survey is anonymous. The participant can lie in the survey, lie about participating, or submit the survey multiple times.

Your example was not anonymous. But you did not break the participant's trust, thank you! (Or maybe you are lying.)

Anonymous example: Sending a clean link to people to take the survey. If not enough answers have been received, a reminder can be sent to all, with a clause, that says: "if you have already done it, you can ignore the reminder."