

Give Yourself 5 Stars? Online, It Might Cost You - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/technology/give-yourself-4-stars-online-it-might-cost-you.html?hp

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ScottWhigham
On one side, we have everyone saying "The US is becoming a police state! Too
many police and too many ambiguous laws have led to a constant state of
surveillance and police targeting." On the other hand, you have Yelp saying
(FTA) _“This shows that fake reviews are a legitimate target of law
enforcement,” said Aaron Schur, senior litigation counsel for Yelp, which has
taken an aggressive approach in screening out reviews it believes to be
false._

How will this be enforced? There's only one option: hire more employees to
investigate/bait. And if you need to hire more employees, you need more
managers to "help" those employees stay on task. I'd assume we need no fewer
than five employees and one manager - so that's probably $400,000 per year
($70k per emp in salary+benefits+taxes and $120k per year for the manager).
Maybe I'm off $25k-$40k in either direction. Either way - it's a lot of cash
per year that the city has to pay. Might even need to raise taxes - just one
quarter of a cent on every $100k in property taxes ought to cover it.

 _The investigation revealed a web of deceit in which reviewers in Bangladesh,
the Philippines and Eastern Europe produced, for as little as a dollar a rave,
buckets of praise for places they had never seen in countries where they had
never been._

Probably going to need Yelp/etc to give the city the IP addresses of those
reviewers - that's going to require a judge's order. Better add in another
$250k in costs associated with legal fees while we're at it. Maybe we really
need a whole department-sized effort - 15 employees, 3 managers, and a super.

