Inevitably when my family decides to go out to eat, my father tells me to get on Yelp and find a place to eat. It seems so simple, an app that is designed to streamline businesses and filter out the good from the bad in an open online setting through user feedback. But what if I told you that there was a dark side of these online review applications?
These apps can be incredibly useful when choosing a place to eat or visiting a new place, however, they have one critical error, user feedback.
Anyone who has ever watched Gordon Ramsey’s kitchen fixer upper series “Kitchen Nightmares” knows how a bad Yelp score can kill a restaurant's business.
All it can take is a few disgruntled customers or employees to stop the flow of traffic into your eatery.
Conceptually if you wanted to put a place out of business, all you would have to do is get ten friends and write scathing reviews over the period of a month and watch as the flow of customers gradually end. On the flip side, what if you could create a restaurant that didn’t exist at all?
That is exactly what Vice writer Oobah Butler did, turning his backyard into the top restaurant in London.
He listed his “restaurant,” dubbed “The Shed” (named after the shed in his backyard) on Tripadvisor and forged the pictures of food and listed no address, and with no system for proofing the restaurants on Yelp’s end; it worked.
After all, the best way to make something completely exclusive is for it not to exist at all. This caught on and as people couldn’t see through his trickery, Tripadvisor has “The Shed” listed as the top restaurant in London for a full two weeks. Eventually, Butler shut down “The Shed,” but his journey through the uncharted waters of online reviews was certainly noteworthy.
Butler’s actions were obviously harmless (short of a few disgruntled customers that were unable to get into his fake establishment), though this online review trend has created a few monsters.
Google now allows companies to pay to skip the line and have their websites promoted above other sites when a certain keyword is searched.
This may not seem like a huge deal, but let’s take a look at how it works. If I google “shoes” here is what comes up, at the top of the page are three results that have been paid for and marked as “Ad.”
At the end of the page are three more results marked as “Ad,” making 6/18 of the total results on the page paid for. In addition to the paid ads, there is a google map providing shoe stores near you, with some of the top rated stores listed.
These stores are rated on google reviews, which is yet another online review service that can be manipulated by users. Lastly, four of the six sites (Nordstrom Rack, Zappos, and Shoes.com listed) that are advertised are actually listed in the unsponsored sites, likely due to an increase in traffic from the advertising, bumping them up through Google’s algorithm. In reality, this makes 10/18 of the sites on the first page of Google paid for.
Maybe you’re still not concerned, that’s fine. After all, this stuff happens all the time and the sky hasn’t fallen.
Allow me to introduce you to Bryan Seely. Seely is a former US Marine and a cybersecurity expert. Seely may be an expert, but what he did required nothing that any ordinary citizen can’t do themselves.
Seely saw these fake companies and how people were exploiting Google’s pay to the system and he wrote both Google and the FBI about it.
After seeing zero changes Seely decided to make a statement, and a bold one. He set up a fake account for the FBI on google maps, using his own phone number as the contact.
The phone call would be recorded as it automatically redirected to the actual FBI, and everyone who clicked on the first result for the FBI would have their calls recorded. This exploitation was simple but incredibly effective.
Seely later turned himself into the FBI, having done nothing wrong. At first they didn’t believe him, but he had one of the agents call in.
When the call was done, Seely played the call back from his own device, and the mood changed.
He was placed in a cell despite having done nothing technically illegal. He was later released but his story shows how vulnerable this system can be and how it could be manipulated by the wrong people.
This story is one of the pitfalls of today’s technology driven world. It isn’t one that necessarily needs to be regulated and restricted, but it requires people keeping an eye on it to keep it honest.
For every service created there are endless ways to exploit it, and the onus is on the people to keep the people exploiting it from succeeding.
People don’t have to be hacking the US Federal Government like Seely to be implementing change, but they need to stay informed and be aware of the ever changing world around them. An informed public is the only way to combat abuse and ignorance in the world today.
