

Ask HN: Has this been done yet? - jawns

A site where people can report a restaurant where they suspect they got food poisoning ... and if enough people report the same place in a given time frame, they all get notified, so they can pursue a claim against the place as a group.  (Site could make money by, say, offering lawyer referrals.)
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rick888
It might work. However, you will have to worry about false alarms/people not
telling the truth. In addition to this, we always don't know where we got food
poisoning.

This could lead to a situation where you, the site owner, are sued. This is
probably why most people don't start a site like this.

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kmort
Perhaps this is something that may be mined from the Twitter firehose (which
may be easier than marketing a new site).

Let's be generous and say:

    
    
      Two mentions in the firehose would be sufficient for a correlation
      8% of people twitter
      25% of twitterers would tweet that they were food poisoned AND name the restaurant
      25% of the patrons got food poisioning
    

Any restaurant with at least (2 / 0.08 / 0.25 / 0.25) 400 patrons for the
given time period would trip the alarm.

Those are pretty generous numbers though, with the figure jumping quite
significantly as they're tweaked. A 25% poisoning rate for a reasonably-sized
restaurant would probably hit the news beyond Twitter anyway.

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mryan
How would you prevent a restaurant from reporting all of their competitors?

What happens when a restaurant subpoenas you for the personal details of
someone who posted a derogatory report?

I find kmort's suggestion interesting - using Twitter (i.e., data that is
already public) could be a smart move, as you would then be simply displaying
the data rather than compiling/publishing it yourself - this could reduce your
legal liability when (not if!) a restaurant wishes to defend themselves
against a report.

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kingofspain
In my experience, restaurants do not have a sense of humour about this kind of
thing. One site I ran had several legal threats over user reviews even vaguely
implying they fell ill. Other threats came over reviews they felt inaccurate.

A health scare can easily destroy a business like this so I'd be very very
wary!

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kakaylor
The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has links to each state's
Department of Health [1]. They will follow up on reports of food poisoning and
take necessary action.

[1] <http://www.foodsafety.gov/about/state/index.html>

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raquo
You could extend that concept to patents
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1792087> and a lot of other areas. I'm
not sure how common is restaurant poisoning (never experienced it), you may
want try to fit this idea in other industries.

