
Court Rules That Yelp Must Unmask the Identities of Seven Anonymous Reviewers - middleclick
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/court-rules-that-yelp-must-unmask-the-identities-of-seven-anonymous-reviewers/282959/
======
smoyer
To me, this sounds like the court overstepped their bounds. I'd be surprised
if a carpet cleaning company didn't have at least a few negative reviews, but
looking at the reviews on Yelp that did have their names, I'm a bit shocked
this company is still in business. Now that they've sued to find anonymous
customers, the reviews are filling up with dis-satisfied non-customers (fun to
read):

[http://www.yelp.com/biz/hadeed-carpet-
alexandria?nb=1](http://www.yelp.com/biz/hadeed-carpet-alexandria?nb=1)

P.S. It also seems like most people are unhappy with both their business
practice (holding "finished" rugs hostage unless an increased price is paid)
_AND_ with the quality of their work.

------
notlisted
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but _it 's high time_... TripAdvisor, Yelp and
several other sites all have the same issue.

In the competitive NYC hotel biz, competitors and people with post-stay
expenditure remorse have been posting false/fake reviews of encountering
bedbugs/mice/ants, blood/semen stains, pubic hair (can it ever anything else?)
and prostitutes.

Since reviewers have no obligation to prove they actually stayed at a
property, they can say whatever they want. Property owners meanwhile have zero
recourse other than a management response and without reservation details they
can't even investigate claims.

Competitors can usually be detected by references to their own hotels as
better alternatives. 'Remorsees' are trickier, but there are patterns as well.
For instance, they do not address issues during their stay, as indicated in
post-stay surveys, but once they read the credit card statement, they send in
complaints and post negative reviews thinking the "squeaky wheel gets the
grease" (spoiler: they rarely do).

I have even seen negative reviews posted which are promptly followed up on
with a "settlement offer" email to the hotel ("Just give me back 50% and I
will remove my review. If you don't, I will post this review on every trip
review site on the planet.")

The worst thing I've seen is a claim of bedbugs crawling from the mattress
(impossible, they're tempurpedic and bedbug sniffing dogs visit the rooms at
least once a month) where the reviewer had uploaded an image from Wikipedia,
claiming it was a bedbug he'd caught in his room... We traced that one back to
a self-proclaimed journalist/blogger miffed at not getting free nights in
return for an article... In this particular case, reservations for this hotel
dropped by 20% overnight and we had to threaten a lawsuit for the site in
question to get it removed when they remained unresponsive.

After analyzing 5+ years of customer feedback and surveys, I can tell you than
a lot of visitors should have just thought twice before going on a trip...

~~~
aaronem
Makes sense to me, and I say this as one who has posted several negative
reviews on Yelp under the same name that's on his driver's license. Yelp's
primacy in its field means that a negative review on the site can
substantially depress the business of the company so disfavored. Given that
potential impact, why shouldn't I be prepared to stand behind my words? Why
shouldn't anyone?

Anonymous speech on the Internet is of enormous value, but I fail to see why
the protection of anonymity should be extended to outright slander. Such
permissiveness can only dilute the perceived value of anonymous speech as a
whole, with potentially disastrous effects on those who cannot speak in safety
otherwise.

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nizmow
This is Yelp - don't they have a track record of leaving fabricated negative
reviews for companies that refuse to do business with them? They probably
don't want to reveal the identities of the anonymous reviewers because they're
not actually real people.

~~~
rosser
I don't think I've ever heard of Yelp _fabricating negative reviews_ , though
there have indeed been numerous allegations of their downplaying positive
reviews of businesses that don't pay their Yelp Tax.

~~~
sliverstorm
That said, the more we hear about their business practices, the easier I find
it becomes to wonder if we will indeed one day discover Yelp-fabricated
negative reviews.

------
Shinkei
This is an important issue that has not yet been tackled in regards to doctor-
patient interactions. This relationship has a lot of legal doctrine and is
very much 'one-way' in the information control--in a nutshell, HIPAA (law)
prevents a physician from releasing information about a patient without their
consent. Yet, there are review sites that allow people to anonymously review
their physician. But now imagine that the patient's name is visible, the
physician STILL CAN'T defend themselves because the information would be
protected from release. So, consider this situation--you can neither confront
the accuser nor answer with rebuttal.

And yes, the comments may be defamatory if there are statements of fact that
are not true. I'm really shocked by the number of people in that site's
comments that are comparing this to revolution in Syria or Egypt. I mean,
really people? That is almost farcical to the point of Poe's law.

The summary of this whole legal shenanigans seems to be that a business got
bad reviews and wants to confirm if these people leaving reviews were actual
customers. I think it's hard to make an argument against this stance,
especially if this can be done in a way that doesn't reveal the reviewer's
identities to the carpet company--say a neutral third party mediator. It would
cost a lot less than an appeal.

If you want to know why Yelp is fighting this, it's not about your civil
liberties. Look at the bad precedent it would set for their business model--if
that case won, any business in VA could force Yelp to respond to inquiries
regarding any anonymous reviews. Sounds like a cumbersome and expensive reason
to keep fighting.

~~~
saraid216
> I'm really shocked by the number of people in that site's comments that are
> comparing this to revolution in Syria or Egypt.

Welcome to America, land of the wish-we-were-as-brave-as-them.

~~~
waps
Here's how you recognize "brave" people : they don't exist. There's 2 groups
of people in Syria : those who have no choice, on both sides, and criminals
hiding behind religion.

Now why both sides have no choice is simple, but distressing. There's no real
solution.

First the real "revolutionaries". They fight because the cost of living in
Syria has risen beyond their capacity and they can't leave. They are not
brave, except insofar as they choose to fight now rather than wait until
they're dead.

Second the "government". They are a minority religious group in a strict
islamic country. To sunni muslims they are worse than the Jews. They can't fix
the economy any more than Barack Obama can (or for that matter Bush, or
whoever). They also cannot give up their position : sunnis will exterminate
them in Syria just like they've done in Iraq, just like they're trying to do
to the Jews in Israel. Sunnis are not making a secret of this. In short : they
can't give in to terror, because giving in to terror escalates terror (for
obvious reasons). What's weird here is that they have the support of other
minority religious groups, like Syrian Druze muslims, who fight for them (just
like they fight for the Jews in Israel, despite having the choice).

And thirdly you have the criminals, the "real believers" _, the mujahideen (
"swords of faith"), who fight to exterminate any non-wahhabi. Do NOT look at
this link unless you know what you're getting into
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVLZPxCEggw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVLZPxCEggw)
. This is what saudi arabia is paying for, mostly with US oil money.

_ note that obviously these people don't believe. They rape, they gamble, they
drink, and they know this perfectly well. Now you can try to make an argument
that islam only demands you enforce islamic law on others, you don't actually
have to follow it yourself. But these people do not really believe in any
meaningful sense. They want to do this, and they're given the chance to get
away with it. That's how they're recruited, those are the promises. (Of course
you could -correctly- point out that that's the promise the paedophile prophet
made to the first muslim converts : that they would get to rape, pillage and
raid).

~~~
saraid216
Yes, but this requires that people understand what's going on in Syria/Egypt.
That's not the case with the people who compare their situation to the Arab
Spring and the like. They make the comparison because it lionizes their
identification as underdogs in an oppressive governmental regime, not because
it has a whit of accuracy. They see the press praise the revolutionaries are
brave people, so they compare it to themselves.

------
GhotiFish
... On the one hand, that is pretty messed up.

On the other, I'm not OK with Yelp the extortion racket getting advertising.

~~~
debt
What extortion racket?

~~~
GhotiFish
Well, it really kicked off in ~2009 when this story popped:
[http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-
business-...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/yelp-and-the-business-of-
extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635)

Many owners alleged that they received cold calls from Yelp about negative
reviews, offering refuge in exchange for buying advertising on yelp.

Yelp didn't have much to say short of denials, but rumours of it ran pretty
rampant. Here's a recent response to them by yelp:
[http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/05/no-yelp-doesnt-
extort-s...](http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/05/no-yelp-doesnt-extort-small-
businesses-see-for-yourself.html)

Of course, business owners are alleging foul play in the black box filtering
algorithm, not the deletion per say, but that's sort of how the rumour evolved
anyway.

Too much shit has being thrown at yelp, and admittingly not all of it has
stuck, but I wouldn't trust anything on there. I don't trust their black box.

~~~
belorn
How is that different from Google putting bought links at the top for search
results?

I guess, one could argue that Google do not _call_ companies and say: "You've
had a really good website for key words "foo and bar", but the few first one
at the top goes elsewhere. Pay us $299 a month and your website will be at the
top".

~~~
markdown
Google puts bought links above and to the side of their search results. These
links are clearly separated labelled advertisements and are thus no different
to any other online/print advertisements

That is not by a very long stretch of the imagination the same as what Yelp
does.

Yelp offer to bury negative reviews in exchange for payment. That's the very
definition of extortion.

~~~
nocoment
I think the point was that Yelp's algorithm is not clear and is >rumored< to
be biased to raise their own income.

While google is higher profile and would not keep an intentional practice
secret for long, it is also not an entirely neutral party.

For example, changing it's algorithms to move businesses lower than other
sites (review, blog, forum, etc) may make sense from the user perspective to a
degree. But taking that even further works against both the customer and
businesses to google's monetary benefit. Then the businesses must purchase SEM
from google for searches that were directed at finding the business.

Dropping organic list algorithm changes whenever they hurt SEM profit combined
with A/B testing to raise conversion rates/revenue on the advertising could
end up with an effective extortion racket simply because that is optimal when
you have a monopoly.

~~~
markdown
I appreciate your viewpoint, but I'll argue that were Google to do that, it
still wouldn't be extortion.

There is a ethically a world of difference between:

a.) Having the option of paying to appear higher in the rankings (IIRC Yahoo
used to do this way back when) and...

b.) Getting a call from Yelp informing you of some "anonymous" negative review
posted about your business, with the offer of "making it go away" in exchange
for cash.

------
mig39
I dunno, I'm ok with anonymous reviews, but not _false_ reviews. That's what's
being claimed here: that the people leaving the negative reviews were never
clients of the carpet cleaning company.

I can't think of a way to weed out the false ones, though, other than to
reveal their names and allow them to be sued.

~~~
rosser
I'm not sure if there's an entity that could be trusted to do this, but if
there were, the court could simply have Yelp release the identities of
Hadeed's reviewers, and Hadeed's release its customer list, to the same
(bonded, or otherwise contractually/legally obligated to maintain privacy)
third party. That third party could then LEFT OUTER JOIN the lists, and
release to Hadeed's the identities of any parties that have reviewed, but
aren't actual customers, without also disclosing the identities of actual
customers who've left legitimate negative reviews.

Of course, that might risk revealing the existence of any _positive_ non-
customer reviews, and with a company of the sort this one seems to be, I'm not
willing to bet that's the empty set.

EDIT: phrasing.

~~~
ams6110
Sounds reasonable. I'm not sure how you prove that Hadeed is giving them the
complete list, though.

~~~
nardi
Yeah, that's the problem. Hadeed could just strip out customers that had
negative experiences from their list, and then sue those customers for
defamation.

~~~
BeoShaffer
Sorta, IANAL but that would put them into perjury territory which is a huge
deal if they get caught. How likely that is depends on how smart they are, but
its quite possible. For example, if any of the customers didn't pay in cash
thats going to leave a paper trail.

~~~
icambron
Or has a receipt, or knows some people who could be witnesses for it, or lots
of other possibilities. Filing bogus lawsuits is a tried and true intimidation
tactic, but perjury is just dumb.

------
espressod
Yelp's response: [http://officialblog.yelp.com](http://officialblog.yelp.com)

~~~
__pThrow
Thank you, but to be precise it is:

[http://officialblog.yelp.com/2014/01/protecting-consumer-
fre...](http://officialblog.yelp.com/2014/01/protecting-consumer-free-speech-
in-virginia-a-fight-well-continue.html)

------
DannyBee
On the free speech issue, the majority is clearly wrong, and the dissent is
clearly right. I expect either en banc or a higher court to fix this.

Past that, i'm not sure why yelp continues the jurisdictional argument (that
VA has no jurisdiction over them).

They have a registered agent in VA, yet claim this does not give VA
jurisdiction over them. While there is a split of authority over this across
states (with most federal courts holding the states can do this), this is
unlikely to be one of the close cases these splits represent.

Yet they continue to press the jurisdictional argument, pissing off every
court along the way, while they have 0% chance of winning a jurisdictional
challenge at any level (even if the registered agent issue was resolved in
their favor, the court would _still_ have jurisdiction over them under other
tests).

I have serious trouble understanding this strategy. All it does is make you
seem unreasonable, which, for better or worse, increases your chances of
losing on the real argument.

~~~
falsedan
Yelp's legal counsel would be incompetent not to attempt a defense which
results in the case being thrown out. They must have reason to believe that
they have a >0% chance of successfully arguing it.

Additionally, the US justice system is not like a playground: your legal
tactics on one case, no matter how distasteful, will have no bearing on the
decision of another case. Judges don't think, "hmm, they did some tricky hot-
shot lawyering on that other case, time to take 'em down a notch or two!".

~~~
DannyBee
"Yelp's legal counsel would be incompetent not to attempt a defense which
results in the case being thrown out. They must have reason to believe that
they have a >0% chance of successfully arguing it."

False. On both counts. Parties press completely frivolous claism all the time.
Pressing frivolous claims does not make you a good lawyer, or competent, nor
is it malpractice to avoid making frivolous arguments.

"Additionally, the US justice system is not like a playground: your legal
tactics on one case, no matter how distasteful, will have no bearing on the
decision of another case. Judges don't think, "hmm, they did some tricky hot-
shot lawyering on that other case, time to take 'em down a notch or two!"."

First, both of these are in the same case. Maybe you should read the appeals
court decision?

Second, please don't lecture me about the US justice system condescendingly.
I'm not sure where you practiced law in the US, but my experience as a US
lawyer for many years now tells me this is 100% completely and totally
inaccurate, as much as one would like it to not be. Certainly in the federal
court system, things tend to be better, but at a state and local level?
Please. Judges are not completely objective robotic automatons. If you really
think behavior has no impact on decisions, i urge you to rethink this stance.

------
derwiki
What does Yelp actually have to furnish? If the "identities" are "John Doe"
and throwaway420@gmail.com, are they complying by just handing over that
information? Or are they legally obligated to identify the reviewers as real
people? What if the reviewers aren't US citizens?

~~~
bertil
They most likely have to keep login time and IP (terrorist laws and all that);
that can lead to the ISP that may or may not be US-based. If it is (and the
judge grants a warrant, which appears likely) then you have a narrower base of
users to consider. If the comment is from somewhere outside of the US, unless
it’s suddenly a trend to cross an ocean to have your carpet cleaned, Yelp
would have to consider the possibility that the comments might have been fake,
face little legal consequences presumably, and erase those. I know I can be
lack creativity, but… trolling a dodgy carpet cleaner half a world away?
Seriously? The most convoluted case I'll consider is competition — and ever
that seems far-fetched.

Include here a ton of CSI-based scenarii on people using chat-room and web-
cafés to communicate convoluted plot via dry-cleaner reviews, over-zelaous
investigators and tech wizz using the ‘enhance’ button and green lines
bouncing around the globe to trace the actual IP.

------
valvoja
Actual people still write real reviews on Yelp?

~~~
roel_v
Well, that's the question in this case :)

------
ChristianMarks
Startup idea: comment litigation insurance.

------
crator
The solution is to stop asking users' email addresses, and for the users to
create dummy accounts at mailinator.com and similar sites, if they really have
to provide one. Furthermore, VPN+tor is quickly becoming a necessity.

These users should not defame that shop, if it does not deserve that kind of
remarks, but the solution is not to get a paper-pushing cunt along with his
brutal idiots to terrorize the entire situation. We need a _decentralized_
legal system, not one that centralizes its corruption under the custody of a
bunch of depraved politicians who have long learned how to game the election
system, which is now fully broken. The broken and backdoored election system
no longer justifies anything at all, if it ever has.

