Novojustice

James McWilliams, the Atlantic:

“As more and more "conscientious carnivores" do what their designation dictates and, as did our chef, move closer to confronting the ethics of slaughter, they’ll be similarly jarred into recognizing the gravity of killing a live animal. They’ll witness firsthand the fact that the animal does not want to die. And in so doing, they will either have to acknowledge the easy way out of the carnivore’s dilemma (choosing not to kill animals for food) or they will have to, a la the chef, desensitize themselves to the slaughter, thereby undermining the conscientious part of "conscientious carnivore."

All these problems with conscientious carnivorism—the killing of an animal despite acknowledging its moral worth, the economics of efficient production, and the desensitization required to deal with the slaughter—end up collectively supporting the very foundation of factory farming. As long as we’re willing to commodify a living creature that has intrinsic worth, directly link its lifespan to consumer demand, and numb ourselves to the painful essence of the slaughter, we’re doing nothing more than reaffirming the core values of factory farming. It might feel good to call ourselves "conscientious carnivores," but at some point we’ll have to recognize that the only conscientious carnivore is, alas, an herbivore.”

Brad Tuttle, Time Moneyland:

“Bing Liu, a University of Illinois at Chicago computer-science professor, has made a habit of calling attention to fake online reviews. He is one of several experts trying to develop sophisticated detection software to rid the Web of “opinion spam,” as he calls it, which includes fake reviews, fake comments and fake blogs. Liu has estimated that for some products, it’s a safe bet that 30% of the reviews are fake. As things now stand, it’s easy to see why businesses are interested in pumping up online ratings, even if they have to resort to fraud. Liu told the Times:

“More people are depending on reviews for what to buy and where to go, so the incentives for faking are getting bigger,” said Mr. Liu. “It’s a very cheap way of marketing.”

A group of Cornell researchers is also working on algorithms that would out fake reviews. In their study, “Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination,” researchers used their software to sift through a pool of hotel reviews — 400 fake, 400 real. The software detected the fakes 90% of the time, while a group of humans challenged with naming the fakes was correct only slightly more than half the time.

One of the report’s authors, Myle Ott, spoke with me last week and explained that the software takes note of subtle signs that most people overlook. “Truthful reviews tend to have more punctuation, such as dollar signs, which indicate a specific that’d only be known to someone who has been there,” he said. “There are also more specific details, like the hotel location or that the room was small or large.”

Fake reviews, by contrast, tended to have more superlatives and adverbs in the writing (makes sense) and more details that were “external to the hotel,” such as whom the reviewer was traveling with. The fakes were also filled with pronouns, rather than proper names — because someone who had never been to a hotel wouldn’t know the name of the bellman or the woman at the front desk.

While no major websites are using Cornell’s software, anyone who is interested can give it a try at ReviewSkeptic.com. It’s still marked Beta, but you can cut and paste any online review and the software will instantly do an assessment and state whether the review is truthful or fake. The site notes that it “works best on English hotels” and that it’s “currently offered for entertainment purposes only.”

The Cornell team’s latest research, which Ott wasn’t fully at liberty to discuss, expands well beyond online hotel reviews. It was prompted in part by its discovery that fake online reviews are being solicited by doctors.

“That was really disturbing,” said Ott. “The worst thing that could happen because of some fake reviews at a hotel site is that you spend the night in a bad hotel. But doctors? We’re talking really high stakes.”

At least, according to Ott’s research, doctors’ reviews don’t have the highest prevalence of deception online. That ignominious distinction belongs to sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, which allow anyone to post a review, without requiring proof that the reviewer has actually done business with the hotel or restaurant being rated. (Some sites, includingHotels.com and Priceline, only accept reviews from customers who have booked rooms.) Ott says that at the sites with the highest rate of deception, around 10% of the reviews are flagged as fake by the software.

TripAdvisor, which, interestingly enough, changed the slogan in its online reviews section from “Reviews you can trust” to “Reviews from our community” last fall, responded to the Cornell team’s findings by pointing to a survey it commissioned showing that 98% of respondents said that TripAdvisor hotel reviews were accurate to their experience. TripAdvisor also told me that “attempts to manipulate TripAdvisor are extremely rare,” and that “we have a zero-tolerance approach to all fraudulent activity and we have measures to penalize businesses for attempts to game the system, including affecting their popularity rating on the site and posting public warning notices on properties that have made attempts to manipulate their rating.”

Lots of people out there thinking about this problem.  Interesting that Cornell is now looking at doctors…

James Hall, The Telegraph:

“Following a four month investigation, the Advertising Standards Authority found that it was possible for “non-genuine content” to appear on Tripadvisor, which is designed to allow holidaymakers to share tips and opinions on places they have visited.

The advertising watchdog said that because reviews can be posted on the site without any form of verification, Tripadvisor must no longer claim that all of its reviews are honest, or even from real people.

In a strongly-worded ruling, the ASA told Tripadvisor “not to claim or imply that all the reviews that appeared on the website were from real travellers, or were honest, real or trusted”.

The ASA’s ruling, which applies only to Tripadvisor’s UK site, follows a complaint last year from two unnamed hoteliers and a website called Kwikchex, which helps companies manage their online reputations.”

Interesting that no one has used the BBB NAD process to try this in the US…

Somini Sengupta, NYT:

‘IN the United States, federal legislation on online privacy has languished, as lawmakers weigh the interests of consumers and companies in the battle for personal information.

Part of the difficulty in regulating online privacy is the speed of technological innovation. Just as it becomes remarkably easy for us to share our information with others, it also becomes cheaper and easier to crunch and analyze that information — and store it forever, if necessary.

Stewart A. Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, is among those who see enormous benefits for private companies and government agencies alike. To fight it on privacy grounds, he argued, would be largely futile. “You can’t really have a property interest in data,” he argued. “It’s going to get cheaper to reproduce it. It’s going to get reproduced and stored. It’s going to get copied.”

Privacy advocates worry about the consequences. Most people may not have much to hide. For a few, not sharing personal information may be vital. They’re the ones who need the protection of the law, argued Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “Consent of the Networked,” a book about digital freedom.

“It may be victims of domestic abuse who don’t want to be stalked or tracked, or it could be dissidents in Syria, or someone who has weird opinions and could mistakenly end up on a watch list when they don’t deserve it,” said Ms. MacKinnon. “If you have a democratic society, the point is not to say whatever is good for the majority is all we need.”’

I think there needs to be a central privacy complaint process where anyone who feels their privacy has been violated can come and get justice.  I think Truste would be the perfect place to host it.

Mitch Lipka, Reuters:

‘Heather Peters’ win in a Los Angeles small claims court against Honda Motor Co has all the makings of a David vs. Goliath battle, but some experts are sceptical it will spur angry consumers nationwide to do what she did: abandon complaint lines, class-action suits and lawyers, and just go it alone through the legal system.

Peters won a $9,867 judgement against the automaker after she complained that her 2006 hybrid only got 30 miles to the gallon, not the 50 she said Honda (7267.T) led her to expect.

To file the suit, she opted out of a class action that included some 200,000 consumers and that is proposing a settlement that would amount to a fraction of her judgment amount.

"The wonderful news here is consumers can fight back. The headline is: ‘Consumers win this round,’" says John Mattes, a San Diego-based consumer attorney who runs his own practice. "She opened the door for consumers all over the country. The consumer army marching into small claims court is a very powerful force."’

This is what Modria is aiming to do.  Much more efficient than going through a multi-year class action process.

By Dina ElBoghdady, Washington Post, Published: January 28

“Fuming about a billing dispute with his dentist, Robert Allen Lee posted his complaints on two consumer review Web sites, triggering a legal battle over a technique designed to snuff out negative online commentary.

In late August, a day after Lee posted his comments on Yelp and DoctorBase, he received a letter from the dental practice threatening to sue him for at least $100,000 for “defamation, slander and libel.” The letter reminded him that he’d signed an agreement with his dentist that barred him from publishing a critique of her or her office.

While extreme, such do-not-talk contracts underscore the struggle between consumers that are eager to share their thoughts online and companies that are looking for ways to protect their reputations in an environment in which social media helps shape opinions on just about everything.”

I suspect this particular technique for blocking patient reviews is on its last legs.

From the Diamond Certified site:

“A dispute may arise from an unmet expectation or a simple misunderstanding. Many disagreements are resolved after the parties work with each other using the contract and industry standards for guidance.

If you have tried unsuccessfully to resolve a disagreement please contact us atinfo@diamondcertified.org or (800) 738-1138. Our mediator will work with you and the Diamond Certified^® company to attempt to reach an agreement that both parties can live with.

If the mediation fails to produce a mutually-agreeable solution due to failure of the Diamond Certified^® company to honor contractual obligations, uphold industry standards, or participate in good faith, we will refund your purchase price up to $1,000.

To qualify for this guarantee, the customer must:

• Have purchased the services of a company that was Diamond Certified® at the time of the transaction
• Have attempted to resolve the issue with the company directly
• Bring the matter to our attention within 6 months of the qualified purchase or within 6 months of the failure to perform to contract
• Have no previous or concurrent complaints against the subject company elsewhere
• Be willing to allow the company to correct the problem”

Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes
Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact
Gordon Hodson and
Michael A. Busseri

Brock University
Gordon Hodson, Department of Psychology, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Ave., St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1 E-mail: ghodson@brocku.ca

“Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.”

Bing Liu, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is trying to devise mathematical models that can unmask fake product endorsements. “The incentives for faking are getting bigger,” he said. “It’s a very cheap way of marketing.”

David Streitfeld, NYT:

‘As the collective wisdom of the crowd displaces traditional advertising, the roaring engines of e-commerce are being stoked by favorable reviews. The VIP deal reflects the importance merchants place on these evaluations — and the lengths to which they go to game the system.

Fake reviews are drawing the attention of regulators. They have cracked down on a few firms for deceitful hyping and suspect these are far from isolated instances. “Advertising disguised as editorial is an old problem, but it’s now presenting itself in different ways,” said Mary K. Engle, the Federal Trade Commission’s associate director for advertising practices. “We’re very concerned.”

Researchers like Bing Liu, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are also taking notice, trying to devise mathematical models to systematically unmask the bogus endorsements. “More people are depending on reviews for what to buy and where to go, so the incentives for faking are getting bigger,” said Mr. Liu. “It’s a very cheap way of marketing.”’

This problem is going to get way worse very soon.

Ripoff Report:

“Reputation Management the new “digital extortion” Are you thinking about hiring a Reputation Management Company or an SEO company to help “repair” your reputation or hide negative complaints? WARNING! Hiring an SEO company might seem like a good idea, but you might be making a huge mistake – victims claim threats, extortion, and much worse. Is there a negative complaint about you on the Internet? Paying Reputation management companies can make a bad problem much worse…”

“SEO Companies Promise Help, But May Become Your Worst Nightmare
 
Ripoff Report has been told that some Reputation Management SEO companies have even threatened their own customers – keep paying, or the Reputation Management  SEO company will create even MORE complaints about you!  This is shocking, but we have heard these stories over and over again. Links to some of these horror stores are below and more to come. Many have told Ripoff Report they are afraid to post anything about them in fear of retaliation as many have been threatened. Don’t let that friendly salesperson fool you.
 
Here’s the problem — once the Reputation Management SEO company knows who you are and knows that your business is worried about online attacks, they know you are vulnerable.  Armed with that knowledge, unscrupulous Reputation Management SEO companies may even engage in digital extortion by threatening to create more false complaints about you unless you continue paying them.  THIS IS NO JOKE! A link to an investigation by a consumer Reporter will be posted here and as an UPDATE to this story in a few days from the date of this Report posting.
 
ONE OF MANY RED FLAGS
 
While there may be some legitimate SEO companies out there, many are “fly-by-night” operations which have no physical address. They often call themselves affiliates working with other Reputation Repair companies.  Even if the company claims to have a U.S. address, this may just be a rented mailbox or a “virtual office” (“virtual offices” are simply addresses offered for rent to make a company appear more legitimate, but the company is more than likely not actually located at that address).  Reputation management – SEO companies that are actually based overseas in dangerous places like Nigeria, Romania, Russia, India, and places like Canada, can make it look like that are in California, Florida, Colorado, Texas and places in-between using many different VOIP phones along with throw-away cell phones in their advertising.  So if you give them your hard-earned money and don’t see any results, you may have little or no legal recourse at all. Even if they advertise on the radio or TV, or if they are a big publicly held company, .. that is no assurance that the company is reliable.”

OK, take this all with a big grain of salt – but it’s interesting that this is the buzz out there.  The reputation space really is a “Wild West” – as Fertik put it.