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Court to Yelp: Reveal names of negative reviewers
- mik3y 13y agoThe Courthouse News Service article [1] is a little more detailed. What stood out to me was the following bit: > The business sued [..] and subpoenaed Yelp to learn the identities of the anonymous reviewers. Yelp repeatedly refused to respond to it, however, leading the trial court to hold Yelp in contempt. My first thought was, "Gee, that's either lazy or clueless of Yelp!" IANAL; was there a better strategy for Yelp, presuming they wanted to fight user info disclosure at all costs? [1] http://www.courthousenews.com/2014/01/09/64385.htm http://www.courthousenews.com/2014/01/09/64385.htm
- dragonwriter 13y ago> IANAL; was there a better strategy for Yelp, presuming they wanted to fight user info disclosure at all costs? When you receive a subpoena that you don't believe is proper, what you are supposed to do is file a motion to quash the subpoena. Ignoring the subpoena is not usually going to go over well.
- dubfan 13y agoInteresting how that was omitted from the article. Given that and the choices of words and phrases made by the author, this article is clearly biased in favor of Yelp.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoAre we reading the same article? It starts by rubbishing Yelp reviews and painting them as extremely unreliable. I don't think that someone biased in favour of a company would be quite so disparaging about the service they provide. You can be in favour of a particular result in a court case for reasons of supporting a particular outcome in general, without any need to be biased in favour of any of the participants in particular.
- NoPiece 13y agoCould the exposed users sue Yelp? It doesn't seem like Yelp fulfilled their duty to protect them if they failed to respond to the subpoena.
- ErsatzVerkehr 13y agoDoes Yelp have any duty to "protect" them?
- TheCraiggers 13y agoMost of the EULAs / privacy agreements that I've bothered reading typically state that they will not share your private info with any 3rd party, but may share it with law officers as part of a criminal investigation. Also, as I understand it, I can sue anybody for just about any infraction- imagined or otherwise. Doesn't mean I would win, of course, but that's beside the point. IANAL, don't use Yelp, have never read their agreements, and don't know if this situation could even be construed to be a criminal investigation.
- Domenic_S 13y ago> may share it with law officers as part of a criminal investigation Isn't this a civil investigation?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- stonemetal 13y ago>We may investigate and disclose information from or about you if we have a good faith belief that such investigation or disclosure is (a) reasonably necessary to comply with legal process and law enforcement instructions and orders, such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, judicial proceeding, or other legal process served on us Their privacy policy is very easy on the courts.
- ivanca 13y agoIs a common believe by some people that the business model of Yelp for big restaurants is plain old extortion: "Please Pay us a fee to have premium priority! Otherwise some strange negative reviews may appear that you cannot refute nor delete."
- nissimk 13y agoI believe the details of the extortion scam is that if you don't pay up, they "flag" all of the positive reviews so that they are not shown by default and not included in the average. The algorithm for flagging is of course "proprietary."
- stevejohnson 13y agoIt is also a common belief by some people that homeopathy is effective.
- edgarallenbro 13y agoIt is also a common belief by some people that breathing air is necessary to stay alive
- ivanca 13y agoThere is just too many beliefs, we need an app to destroy them all. /cj /s
- pyre 13y agoI believe there are some instances where business owners claim that Yelp offered to 'make bad reviews go away' if they sign up the premium service (i.e. start paying Yelp money). Even if Yelp! doesn't mess with the reviews otherwise (flagging positive reviews, creating bogus negative reviews, etc), that seems very much anti-user (at least towards the people looking for recommendations).
- sliverstorm 13y agoYeah, but homeopathy has no financial incentive to work. Chemistry just doesn't care about things like revenue. Yelp! on the other hand...
- j_baker 13y agoSome people take their Yelp reviews too seriously. I've been to several places that I went to because of their positive score on Yelp only to hear them upset because of the one negative Yelp review they got. I have to say: getting upset because of one or even a handful of negative reviewers is petty. Just about every business that has a significant amount of reviews is going to have one or two. On the other hand, if a business has a ton of negative reviews, that's something to be concerned about. I seriously doubt the solution in either case is to sue the people leaving the negative reviews.
- billnguyen 13y agoYour theory really only works for places with a large amount of reviews (positive or negative). When you have only a handful of reviews, the need for authenticity grows because they carry much more weight. You would need much more data points to avoid the noise of fake reviews.
- j_baker 13y agoThat's not much different from any other form of word-of- mouth advertising. If anything, it's worse. "Did you hear about restaurant x?" "They suck. Don't go there." If you've only got one friend who's been there, that's all the data you have. At least with Yelp, you can see reviews from people you've never met. The big difference between Yelp and any other form of word-of-mouth advertising is that the business owner can actually see the reviews people are giving to others.
- fleitz 13y agoI find the Yelp reviews pretty hilarious, especially dives, I go to this one place all the time that does $2.95 cent breakfast (full plate, coffee, etc) and many reviews talk about how the breakfast was greasy, etc. I'm wondering what kind of culinary miracle they expected to happen for $2.95 cents. http://www.yelp.ca/biz/bons-off-broadway-vancouver http://www.yelp.ca/biz/bons-off-broadway-vancouver I wonder if the people on yelp ever go to metal shows and wonder why it's so loud.
- muyuu 13y agoI guess Yelp is more popular in America. Here in London I don't know anyone who uses it and I never heard anyone mention it.
- TillE 13y agoThat's because Yelp made the strange decision to spend years as a US-only service. I'll never understand why internet companies do that unless there are compelling legal or logistical reasons. In Yelp's case I believe they were using Google Maps from the very beginning, so expansion would have been trivial. Recently they bought and absorbed Qype, which in the absence of Yelp has been the dominant service in Germany at least. That should give them more of a foothold in Europe.
- splonk 13y agoThere are, in fact, compelling legal reasons to not launch products involving user generated content for local businesses in other countries. At a bare minimum, your liability for libelous reviews is different in each country and dealing with that alone is a logistical nightmare. Quite a few other reasons as well, but that's a start.
- rprospero 13y agoI'm in America. I don't know anyone who uses it and I never hear anyone mention it, either. I tried it a couple of times and it's maybe 5% more useful than Google Maps?
- dylz 13y agoAre you in a non super-urban area?
- pessimizer 13y agoHow else would you defend against competitors, extortionists, or ex-husbands destroying your business through straw Yelp reviews? Serious question.
- patrickmay 13y agoAllowing names to be exposed by court order doesn't solve this problem -- people will just sign up with throwaway email addresses and, possibly, use Tor. The best solution is a combination of reviewer reputation and compatibility matching. First, very few people are going to go to the trouble of creating a bunch of valuable reviews just to build up enough karma to be able to smear a particular business. Then, even if someone were that motivated, if Yelp weighted the reviews I see based on how closely my reviews matched the reviewer's past reviews[], standalone smears would have very little impact. [] Yes, I know that sentence should be taken out and shot.
- middleclick 13y agoLast I heard, Yelp blocks all Tor exits. So no, Tor won't work.
- ricardobeat 13y agoI believe Yelp and other sites that offer user reviews already implement strategies like that, weighing comments according to a reputation score based on comment frequency, average rating, bad language, time of/between submissions, IPs, etc. There is an article about that somewhere.
- pessimizer 13y ago>people will just sign up with throwaway email addresses and, possibly, use Tor. But what if real name was forced, like on facebook or google? There's plenty of precedent now if a judge wanted to declare that as a minimum amount of due diligence. I can't comment at the Chicago Tribune without telling them who I went to high school with (through facebook comments.)
- 13y ago
- genwin 13y agoReports of bed bugs is the giveaway to a competitor's fake review for me. Almost always such reviewer has made only 1 review.
- elpool2 13y agoReally? I don't review anything on Yelp, but getting bed bugs from a hotel seems like the sort of thing that would make me sign up just to write one bad review.
- genwin 13y agoI'm willing to throw those babies out with the bath water. I've been to too many hotels that were fine, where every reviewer with only one review had nothing but awful things to say. I find that to be too much of a coincidence.
- mrfusion 13y agoWowsa. Has anyone considered using TOR to post reviews?
- Torgo 13y agoYelp blocks their entire site from Tor. If you try to visit, you will just get a 403 forbidden. citation: I run a tor exit node.
- pstack 13y agoAnd, once they have the identity of the yelp reviewers, they can go over to the rip off report website and post, anonymously, the most hideous and vile things about the reviewer and expose their private and personal information without any recourse whatsoever. Smart tactic. Get their identity and then go harass them. That'll teach them to leave reviews about services and products they have paid for!
- nyar 13y agoThe reviewer can do the same. Getting into a pissing match with an individual as a business is a bad business move.
- brownbat 13y agoSurprised these businesses aren't flooded with one star reviews that simply state that the businesses have sued someone over a negative review.
- Sniffnoy 13y agoThe article mentions that one such review is now the second-from-top on Yelp for this business.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wehadfun 13y agoYelp only hurts (or helps) small new businesses. (McDonald's doesn't need, care, or probably know Yelp). Small business owners invest lots of there personal money, time, sweat, and tears and don't need some stupid brat posting some garbage on Yelp because they were not happy with the $25 they spent.
- kaoD 13y ago"CNet is now available in spanish!! Close [x]" Click close. Click close again. Clickity, clickity, click. No dice. Open JavaScript console. "ReferenceError: om is not defined" Thank you CNet!
- politician 13y ago> Currently, Yelp reviews of the business are less stellar than, for example, reviews on Hadeed Carpet Cleaning's own site. I'm shocked that a company's website has better reviews than an independent third-party review site. Someone call the lawyers.
- darklrd 13y agoYou may not be able to make everyone happy always. Instead of suing your customers for negative comments, it may be better to try and improve your product/service.