4 ms·
Recently a customer posted a very bad review of my app on a public app store. They called me personally a liar, claimed I took weeks to respond to email, that m
by drsim 13y ago
Recently a customer posted a very bad review of my app on a public app store. They called me personally a liar, claimed I took weeks to respond to email, that my service lost their business sales and they paid for a service I didn't provide.
This review caused my established app of nearly two years, more than 90% positive reviews and decent revenues to be pulled from the app store for two days.
I attempted to reach out to the customer to see what I had done wrong, but no reply on any channel (email/twitter/phone). I just wanted to understand what had made them so mad and to rectify it or at least stop it happening again.
With my app reinstated in the app store the worst was over, but still that stain of a very bad review. Thankfully I have great customers who love what I do and it's now been drowned further down. However my installs were substantially down and revenue somewhat.
As both the customer & my company are in England I considered legal action under our libel laws. But after speaking with a lawyer it was clear this would cost me tens of thousands of pounds and the process was far from straightforward for this kind of action. It would need to go to the High Court for judgement.
Now that publicly publishing statements about individuals or businesses to a wide audience is accessible by anyone for no money we need a more accessible legal system to stop harmful and untrue statements floating around for perpetuity on the web.
In my layman's reading this bill seems to edge it forward to cope with the difficulties of 'publishing' user generated content, but there's nothing for victims of untrue statements here. We need this moved forward too.
- Houshalter 13y agoGetting unfair reviews sucks, but can you imagine the mess if companies could go after individuals or organizations for giving them bad reviews? Regardless it shouldn't be law. Let people opt-in or out. For example a review site might require the reviewers to agree that they can be sued for making false statements, or vice versa, that the reviews are not guaranteed to be accurate and reviewers can say whatever they want. I know this is not a perfect solution, but censorship is easily abused and seems absolutely unacceptable to me. People have always said libelous things to each other. But until recently it was just spoken words to each other. Now that much of our communication is in text or available publicly, it's so much easier to target individuals or prove defamation. I suspect that almost everyone is guilty of doing it. The laws were established for print media where there was an expectation that it was supposed to be reliable and truthful. Not for private conversations or between anonymous interneters where that expectation doesn't exist in the first place. For the most part companies don't abuse the laws because they don't want to get bad PR, but there are always people that don't care about pr and have an incentive to abuse it.
- 4rgento 13y agoTo add to the point. IMHO this difamation laws are a patch to problem of people beliving blindly what they read. In times where the press was the most popular medium and few voices could be heard these laws had a reason of existence. In modern times, at least for now, everybody can speak on the internet and defend himself having the same reach as his attacker. TL;DR Is someone difamatig you or your bussines? Post reliable evidence on the internet that shows what is what you actualy do and what other people think about it.
- 6d0debc071 13y agoI don't see how a company could meet a reasonable burden of proof in this regard. Not without altering the requirement to the point where they could go after anyone for anything they happened to say that the company didn't like. - There's enough trouble with legal threats in that regard already. Still, I'm sorry that happened to you :(