Lack of confidentiality for a letter of recommendation I was recently invited to write a letter of recommendation for a colleague applying for a tenure-track position at UCSD.  The email said:

Although a candidate may request to see the contents of letters of evaluation in accordance with California law and University policy, your identity will be held in confidence. The material made available will exclude the letterhead, the signature block, and material below the signature block. Therefore, material that would identify you, particularly information about your relationship to the candidate, should be placed below the signature block. In any legal proceeding or other situation in which the source of confidential information is sought, the University does its utmost to protect the identity of such sources.

Firstly, how does this protect my identity, if the applicant knows whom he has invited to write letters?
Second, doesn't this policy lead to worse letters, without personal anecdotes and examples?
Third, the industry standard has been to allow applicants to waive their right to see the letter, and if they don't waive that right then the letter writer may refuse to write the letter.  Doesn't UCSD's policy remove this safeguard for letter-writers?
As I understand it, although job applicants, grad school applicants, and so on, can nominally &quot;waive their right to see the letters&quot;, in most states this seems to be not enforceable, in the sense that it is not legally possible to genuinely waive this right.
When I've written letters, I construe peoples' waiving of &quot;rights&quot; to be an expression of intent, plus, an acknowledgement of the actual state of things. Yes, I've had people (misguidedly, in my opinion) refuse to waive these rights, which makes me wonder about their perception of things, and who's giving them advice.
And, yes, if someone is of the turn of mind to explicitly refuse to waive, I am much more guarded in my letter... ironically, usually because there are concommitant awkward issues as well.
And, yes, letter readers certainly understand that (in the U.S., in academic math, anyway) there is an expectation of at least pretending to not plan to ever demand to see the letters.
Yes, if we imagine that letter-writing should be fair and unprejudicial, then the issue of non-confidentiality might seem an unhelpful complication. However, decades ago, and, still in many scenarios, information is passed and decisions made in some sort of good-ol'-boy network rather than on a level playing field. That was, and continues to be, a bad thing, and needs pushing-back-against. (My own dept's faculty hiring has traditionally been a sort of star-chamber proceeding, and only this last year some of us have objected to it...)
So, yes, ... complications. :)