Hacker News Reader

Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

They set up a straw man so of course any reviews, positive or negative, are going to be bogus.

But suppose you open a legitimate yogurt shop in Brooklyn, and the competing yogurt shop down the street hires one of those shady Bangladeshi outfits to post a bunch of positive reviews of your business, then rats you out to the AG. The AG is going to come down on you pretty hard, and you're fined, and you're out of business. Mission accomplished.

In other words, be careful what you wish for. This is not an enforceable kind of law.

New York spends a lot of time and money on rather esoteric cases like this when there's plenty of good old fashioned street crimes they could be putting their resources into instead: muggings, gang-related activities, car theft, things that everyone living and working in NYC has to deal with every day of the year.

View on HN

I have been living in NYC for the past 5 years. These are the things I dealt with:

  [ ] muggings
  [ ] gang-related activities
  [ ] car theft
  [X] false restaurant reviews

Yeah. The government should only look out for spoiled rich white people. There are no other people in NYC, right? Also, New York City is just that little island with the tall buildings, right?

NYC actually has an epidemic of persons unlawfully looking through the pockets of black men and I think that should be attended to before restaurant reviews.

Do you mean law enforcement or muggers?

I believe the comment refers to NYC's Stop and Frisk program[0] which has been ruled unconstitutional by a US district judge, who found that the program unfairly targets African Americans and Latinos.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_stop-and-frisk_pr...

That's why the AG created the fake yogurt shop. Zero difficultly in determining the fake reviews. I doubt they would take on the case of a single shop's problems.

> That's why the AG created the fake yogurt shop. Zero difficultly in determining the fake reviews.

Not exactly. It was zero difficulty in determining the SEO companies that were in the business of providing fake reviews. They didn't set up a fake yogurt shop and wait for people to post reviews and then pounce on the reviewers, they set up a fake yogurt shop, and then solicited help in dealing with "negative reviews" from SEO companies, and the help they were offered by some of these companies was in the form of creating fake positive reviews.

A number of the comments on the thread act is if the AG was targeting individual independent reviewers (whether the reviews were fake or otherwise), when in actual fact were targetting two groups of companies:

1. Businesses which were using fake reviews and/or non-disclosed compensated reviews (whether provided by compensated consumers, in-house employees, or outside companies), and

2. Businesses which were providing fake reviews for money.

Wrong, because if you were prosecuted they'd have to show that the purchase of the shill reviews came from you. If it turned out that the order was placed from an IP address connected with your competitor down the street - which it would during even a cursory investigation - then it would be your competitor that was in hot water with the law, not you.

Not if they do it in a library or any of hundreds of wifi hotspots around town. They'd have to be idiots to do something like that on their own data connection.

Also, it is usually a mistake to assume that the U.S. legal system is fair and rational. If the A.G. decides to go after you, you will be facing the fight of your life. Recall that kid who committed suicide after that Massachusetts D.A. threatened him with 35 years of imprisonment over cracking a bunch of scholarly paywalls. Not fair, not rational, not even civilized in my opinion.

You'd be amazed how many criminals are, in fact, idiots. The brainy supervillian is largely a myth. In any case, it would be up to the prosecutor to prove that you were the origin of the dodgy reviews, not up to you to prove that someone else was. If there was insufficient evidence to identify the author, then you couldn't be successfully prosecuted, and most prosecutors won't waste the resources on a case they clearly can't win.

And if you offer Wi-Fi to your customers? What then? A protracted court case? ;)

> They set up a straw man so of course any reviews, positive or negative, are going to be bogus.

Even that isn't necessarily the case. If someone likes the name, location, or nature of the business, as long as they don't say that they visited or had an experience there, no one can say that a positive review of even a fictional business is bogus if the reviewer has a good faith belief that the business exists. In fact it could be argued that the reviewers in this case relied upon fraudulent representations made by the investigators that the business existed and was worthy of positive reviews, and are therefore not liable. It's such a subjective issue, and that of course is why these accusations were settled far outside of a courtroom.

In other words, be careful what you wish for.

Please, we've been assured that this will be the first expansion of police powers into new, unfamiliar domains that doesn't have "unintended" consequences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com