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Carbonite Stacks the Deck With 5-Star Reviews
The Narrative Fallacy writes "In the aftermath of disclosures that Belkin employees paid users for good reviews on Amazon, David Pogue reports in the NYTimes that Carbonite has gone one better with 5-star reviews of its online backup services written by its own employees. Pogue recounts how Bruce Goldensteinberg signed up for the backup service, and all went well until his computer crashed and he was unable to restore it from the online backup while Carbonite customer support kept him on hold for over an hour. Frustrated, Goldensteinberg started reading Carbonite reviews on Amazon and a few of them seemed suspicious. 'They were created around the same date — October 31, 2006 — all given 5 stars, and the reviewers all came from around the Boston, MA area, where Carbonite is located,' including a review by Swami Kumaresan that read more like a testimonial. 'It turned out that Swami Kumaresan is the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. His review gives no indication that he is employed by the company.' Another review posted by Jonathan F. Freidin extols Carbonite without mentioning Freidin's position as Senior Software Engineer at Carbonite. 'It doesn't matter to me that Carbonite's fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old,' writes Pogue. 'These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.'"
No, prosecuted. That is conflict of interest.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Why is anyone surprised? This happens all the time. Anonymous reviews on the Internet + unscrupulous company + morally-gray bloggers looking for a bit of easy cash = cheap, positive publicity.
So... yeah, my blog is in my profile and, uh, I'm willing to sell a bit of my soul if any companies reading this are interested...
Have you heard their ads? They sound like a scam just from that. Or at the very least, they use the annoying advertising tactic of making other options sound way worse than they are, like an infomercial. I hate that company just from their ads, I'm not surprised they really are shady.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Frankly I'm surprised to find any useful feedback at all, given the ease for submitting reviews. The only thing keeping
things from going completely insane is that large companies don't want to get caught cheating.
For smaller stuff, I've already noticed that on the digital products (like Kindle books) where the barrier for entry
is much lower, review spam is a much bigger issue.
"I'm sorry sir, but we've had a problem with our online backup service".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You're assuming they have morals.
Sometimes I wonder - how often do good people in a ruthless business environment actually remain good people? Sometimes I wonder whether the ultra-competitive nature of business causes upstanding moral people to turn into greedy fucks who have lost their original principles and instead turned to making money at all costs.
Kinda scares me, what our capitalistic society sometimes forces people to become to survive in business. Assuming, of course, that I'm not just being naïve and that these people were simply without scruples before they started to cheat their customers with shonky reviews and what else.
Oh man, I worked in a company that did this all the time - positive reviews submitted by employees of the company on various sites, posing as customers of the company. It is a successful and respected online company.
The culture of a place can go a long way to convincing employees that this is the normal thing to do, and that it's just a part of doing business in this competitive world. Brings to mind Stanley Milgram's obediance experiments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Just click on the reviewer and see if they have reviewed anything else and if they have, if it's a diverse range of stuff. I remember seeing a set of self-help books get either really poor reviews or really great ones. I clicked on the 5 star reviews and many of the reviewers were either one time reviewers, or they had a history of favorably reviewing a small circle of self-help books from a specific publisher or author. Often within a tight timeframe rather than anything spaced out between reviews.
I'm sure the reverse is true in circumstances, competing manufacturers giving their competitors' products a poor review. With the same tell-tale signs.
Amazon is very attractive to scam in this fashion although I'm sure sites like epinions and others are becoming targets as well. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are much more sophisticated systems in place than the ones uncovered lately with Belkin and all. What we have been seeing seems all very amateurish - and considering that, after price, having a good star rating at one of these sites may bring in or cost thousands of sales - I would think some manufacturers have to have departments hired to fill the internet with favorable reviews on amazon and other sites, as well as writing blogs or recommendations on blogs with some amount of finesse. Where their employees actually become believeable characters with a bit of history and diversity - perhaps reviewing the other odd item here and there, just enough to be convincing. In fact, they could make put these characters on file and have them become year long projects that become bit reoccuring players in the marketing process.
... only they weren't anonymous. I know this is Slashdot and no one RTFAs, but did you even read the posting?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
There really is a person on this planet named "Jane Q. Public"???
Isn't that kind of, like, overdoing things a bit? It sounds like some sort of pseudonym, but apparently it's your real name, because it says so right over your post.
If it is true that fake reviews are easy to spot, then it should be possible to get a computer to spot them too, you might think.
I find that online reviews are usually pretty worthless when there are, say, less than 5 contributors. Either the reviews are so good they must be employees, etc, or they are angry diatribes from disgruntled customers.
Try looking at reviews for almost any electrical item (even items you own and know to be good) - what you usually find is that all the reviews will be negative because the users are so angry when their device fails they are motivated to let out their frustration somewhere. On the other hand, when things tick along as normal then they can't be bothered to contribute to an online review system.
That is, of course, for the company shills...
These guys should really have their assets... frozen.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
They went through the trouble of making fake reviews for their product... and failed because they used their real names... I don't even know what to say to that...
"This post was found to be satisfactory and it was delivered on time in great condition!"
-Vert^H^H^H^HJohny Luser!
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
There really is a person on this planet named "Goldsteinberg"???
Typical American prejudice - you think it's wrong just because someone has an Arab last name.
I have wondered a few times if there is not some of the same effect happening at slashdot. Some comments seem very curious and I typically notice these things when a new product is introduced. I know some people are just fans of certain things like Fords and Chevys , but sometimes it seems like people are purposely attempting to twist opinions. Perhaps everybody else already knows this is true, and I am the fool who just thinks it is possible.
This is a normal operating procedure.My ex-boss asked me to make a 5 star rating for him on one site because his legit (if not state-of-the art) anti-spyware program was listed as an adware/spyware provider.
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/pcsafe.com
Take a look at the comments. The users "johnatsearching" and "wright" are the from the guy that owns the company. Looking back, he must have made 20 comments to bump up his rankings on the site. He even got his employees into it.
Only one person there mentioned that they were employed by the company. That's sad.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Amazon et al should use a trust metric, preferably one that deals gracefully with attempts to manipulate it. Perhaps something like Advogato's metric could be used, or the manipulation-resistant versions of EigenTrust. What metric one may use, it would help decreasing spammers' powers, since they would presumably not be able to integrate themselves as thoroughly into the system, and definitely not do so in the kind of en masse, flooding, way that traditional spammers make use of.
Why is anyone surprised?
Who says that anybody is "surprised"? It doesn't "surprise" me that people murder, steal, and cheat and that companies pollute, evade taxes, and bribe politicians.
I still want to see it reported and publicized.
So? What Pogue has observed is a SYMPTOM of the bigger problem, not the actual problem itself.
This is precisely how American capitalism works. It's utterly Darwinian: any tactic that enriches your survival prospects and doesn't get you drawn and quartered is perfectly fine. I hate to say it, but we made this bed for ourselves with our own particular brands of indoctrination and econo-political dogma. We mixed up a nasty batch of Koolaid and wound up drinking it ourselves. There are hidden costs to this sort of capitalism.
If you really want to put an end to this sort of behavior, we'll have to start by changing our actual collective values and ethics, and then change our messages of indoctrination that we whisper to our children and each other to reflect those new values. We need to get the population sipping a better mix of Koolaid; what we've been drinking for almost a century is pretty toxic. Violent games may not brainwash gamers to become violent, but the sort of subtle indoctrination that every American receives DOES lead to the sort of behavior that Pogue observed.
It will take a true collective effort and consensus in order to end it. Passing a few more kneejerk laws or whatever ain't gonna cure the underlying problem: Darwinian capitalism.
Well, I'm guessing the latter. I mean: does
A) power corrupt formerly honest and nice people, or
B) it's just natural selection at work, at the biggest turds float to the top?
It seems to me more like B, though I can't say I've done a real study or anything.
The thing is, if you have a dog-eat-dog set up, the ones who refuse to eat other dogs (e.g., because of having morals) never make it big in the first place. Either they don't get promoted, or they get their prices undercut by someone who saves by being a bigger fuck, and either go bankrupt or bought.
As an extreme example to illustrate a point, think, say, a third world country where it's not illegal to dump toxic stuff in rivers and safety laws are non-existent. So company A are the nice guys, they don't want to screw over their workers and community. They invest in filters, invest in safe equipment and training, doesn't bribe/deceive/lobby/make backroom deals, etc. So their products are more expensive. Their competitor, company B, are owned and led by a couple of greedy fucks, who just skip all that extra cost and do any tricks in the book to get a goverment subsidy or contract. If it's a big bribe or shady deal that gets that job done, so be it. So their products are cheaper. Do you have any doubts as to who's going to push the other off the market?
(It's not even as much a hypothetical example, because it used to happen in the first world too, in the not so distant past. E.g., back when the Titanic was built, the norm was IIRC to have one dead worker for every million dollars worth of ship built. The Titanic was remarkable in that they only had IIRC 3 dead workers in accidents during building. But anyway, roll that in your head, they actually made statistics and found it acceptable to kill people rather than spend money on safety. It's not a funny thought.)
It's easy to look afterwards at the big resulting conglomerate "B Industrial Corp" and think, "man, all that power corrupted them." But in fact they got to power by not being nice in the first place.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In fact, it will take regulation to correct the problem.
We've all got that selfish streak in us. We're willing to do the right thing in the interests of fairness, but only if we know everyone else is doing the right thing too.
Without regulation and a robust policing of those regulations we cannot have trust in the system. Slowly, little by little, the whole thing begins to break down as each individual sees that not everyone is playing by the rules, then they too set out on their own path using whatever tactics work for them.
Thirty years of deregulation has pretty much woven the problem deep into the system.
I used to write books, and I hated the fact that you lived and died by the sword of Amazon. And I knew that some authors were gaming their books with better ratings.
While I am not the worlds best writer, I do feel I ok and give my readers some useful information. I don't feel that my books are a waste of money.
Having said that it hurts when your book does really well, and then it is knocked back by the competition. I had a book that hit the top rated, and it was being ranked higher than one of the competition. The competition got some reviewers out and knocked my book back.
I stopped buying at Amazon since I can get cheaper books at a1books.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I looked up Carbonite on the Better Business Bureau. They are BBB accredited with a B+ rating.... Maybe the BBB should be rethinking their scales?
http://reports-boston.bbb.org/Boston/Public/Reports/RR/Report.aspx?i=17194
I read the negative reviews first. I will read some of the positive reviews but I start at the bottom and if I don't get turned off by them as I work my way up then I will probably buy the item.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
While I am not the worlds best writer, I do feel I ok
Is it safe to assume you keep an editor on retainer? Sorry, I just couldn't resist :).
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Fairness and honesty can hardly be called tenets of communism. Laws that enforce fairness and honesty in business practices foster faith in our capitalist system and provide a level playing field for all those that conduct business within the system.
Without laws protecting consumers, the playing field is very much tilted in favor of those with deep legal pockets. Consumer protection laws also force businesses to compete honestly so that the best product at the best price will succeed in the market.
I highly doubt you will find a majority of any population that actually wants businesses to operate dishonestly. Regulations enforcing fairness and honesty ARE consensus.
I find that most people that protest laws protecting consumers usually are the ones trying to game the system to their advantage at the expense of those who could least defend themselves in court.
It's not communism to keep people honest.
Are worthless anyway. If you don't personally know the person, assume its a paid advertisement.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The reviews are clearly labeled "user" reviews, as you mention, not CEO reviews and not employee reviews.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
The company I work at was approached by a guy; conversation went along the lines of "Hi, you look like a good company, but I've never heard of you or seen advertisements" "We find the 'happy customer' approach to marketing works well enough on its own" "That is good. Say, I have possibility to stimulate communities to talk about [company name]. So, I can help you have all your news and services discussed constantly distinctive features spotlighted, etc by independence observers. The number of positive reviews and mentoring of your company will increase in natural way"
Further mails were then directed to /dev/null, but I wonder how many companies would have taken him up on the offer...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
That's really not true. For most books the reviews are quite good. This problem is still limited, though as Amazon seems like it is facing the same problem google did a decade ago. Their reviews are getting influential enough that people game the system. Amazon is going to need to start protecting itself and punishing people who try to game the system.
I'm not saying that there are no unethical businesses, but I believe that most transactions are done in good faith. Maybe it is the field that I have chosen, but most business relationships that I encounter on a day-to-day basis are built on mutual trust and common goals. In fact, if I didn't trust my vendors, I wouldn't do business with them. Period. If I can't rely on the product that they sell me, it is of no use to me. If my company's customers didn't trust the product that we sell, we would go out of business really, really fast. (I work in health care, so people could literally die). If you need a widget to help you perform your core competency, then you make the mistake of buying the cheapest alternative only once. Once you get into big business then having disruptions becomes way too costly to not have vendors and customers that you trust. Even saying that, usually when I run into problems I can more likely attribute the problem to incompetence rather than to malfeasance.
Obviously you have your Enrons, your Madoffs, and your Carbonites, but I think that the these cases are the exceptions rather than the rule.
The stupid thing is, it doesn't even need faked reviews - Carbonite is genuinely good. it's got me out of a scrape several times and the ability to go back to older versions of documents is great too. Ermm.. this is starting to sound like I'm being facetious but really, it is good.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Of course random, unknown people are not trustworthy. While it's trendy to criticize the "MSM" and 'old' media, they do have one essential advantage over crowd-sourced information: MSM publications have a reputation to protect:
1) They are not anonymous. As has often been observed, people are willing to say things anonymously on the Internet that they would never say to anyone's face, or if anyone knew who was speaking.
2) They have an enormous investment in their reputation: Millions (or more) in business, hundreds of jobs, and a reputation that's been built up over decades or more.
3) They have a track record: You know (or can know) the history of their integrity.
Certainly that does not make MSM 100% trustworthy; they are not. But at least when I read David Pogue in the NY Times, for example, I know whom I'm dealing with and I can make a judgment about the chance of and degree to which he might be shilling something.
Lets try that "Freedom of Speach" defense when you yell FIRE in a theater.
Can you say "Freedom of Prosecution"?
Untruthful, damaging speech is not protected. You can't say anything you want in a commercial venue. Being purposefully deceptive for monetary gain is not protected speech.
--- So how about I sell you a car after telling you how perfectly it runs. When you discover that there is no engine in it remember "caveat emptor" so you not going to sue me are you?
(thank god I'm protected!)
They're endorsed by and advertise with Rush Limbaugh, so of course they're corrupt. I wouldn't trust these people with a ham sandwich, let alone my data.
And do you have proof they don't use their product and aren't satisfied with it???
....
And what makes anyone think other companies aren't doing this??
I read both the good reviews and the bad ones, and pay no attention to the 'stars' since most people are morons and couldn't properly rate a software package to begin with. I look for patterns in the good and bad reviews to point to areas where there might be issues. If one person whines about usability, it can probably be ignored. If 20 do, then maybe there is a usability problem.
In other words, think for yourself and do your own research instead of being lead around by someone who appears to know what they are talking about. I got through 4 years of high school because I knew how to BS an essay test. Didn't mean I knew what I was talking about.
Or that I do now
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Regulations aren't the same thing as consensus. Regulations are often rammed down the throats of an unwilling and uncooperative populace by a self-interested minority seeking to use those regulations to benefit themselves a bit more than everyone else.
that would be because the regulation known as "fairness doctrine" was removed from news organizations, meaning they no longer have to provide both sides of a story. This has turned the news into a propaganda mouthpiece for whoever has the most money or power in a given argument.
Regulation and yet more laws in a binder already full to bursting is not the solution.
you're absolutely right, optimization is required: get rid of the bloat. You, however, are proposing anarchy--the same anarchy which led to the collapse of our financial system.
Without "cops", the criminals run free. With too many cops, you have no privacy and no self-determination. The street moves in both ways, not just one.
Trying to legislate socialistic values leads to something that history has already told us will fail: Communism.
I guess its time to repeal those laws against fraud, murder, theft.. after all, it's your responsibility to make informed decisions and protect your own property.
this trollish dreck gets moded up? shame on you!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From: Chris
Date: Tue, March 13, 2007 2:55 pm
To: Editor
Hi Ken:
I just read the above-mentioned article on your site (and the article you personally wrote about the BBB as well), and, yes, the BBB isn't what it appears to be.
I used to work for them, in both Los Angeles CA and Portland OR.
Here's an overview of how the BBB operates -
Companies are recruited into the Better Business Bureau, and every company that becomes a new member pays monthly membership dues.
These dues are based on the overall size of the company (specifically, the number of branch offices and the number of total employees in one city or town, fees are adjusted on a sliding scale).
The more branches and the more emloyees a company actually has, the more expensive their monthly dues will be.
I was a field rep for the BBB. Part of my job involved recruiting new companies into the BBB.
All companies that had "complaints" filed against them were considered "hot leads".
The field reps would call up the companies that had complaints filed against them, and talk to the person who handled each company's checkbook (or branch office's checkbook)...and that person would summarily be informed that there was an outstanding complaint (or complaints) on file against them, and did they realize this?
The representative for the company in question would usually have no clue about the complaint on file at the BBB, and after we made the company's representative nervous by informing them of the complaint, we would then immediately segue into talking about the benefits of membership in the Better Business Bureau...
An appointment would then be set for the field rep to "drop on by and discuss membership benefits, and a proper way for us to handle that complaint" (wink wink).
All companies and/or businesses in any given city or town in the USA are categorized primarily in three different ways -
1) Companies with ZERO complaints on file. (Not much need for the company to join the BBB, since they have no complaints on file.)
2) Companies with complaints on file, for which said companies have been non-responsive. (In other words, these companies have complaints on file but they have never responded to them - these companies are PRIME candidates for BBB membership - wink.)
3) Companies with complaints on file, for which said companies have been responsive. (In other words, these companies have complaints on file and they HAVE responded to those complaints.)
Now, there are some subtleties to this whole thing obviously.
In Portland, I used to work quite closely with the Director of the Portland Bureau, and with her Assistant Director, and one time I recruited a very large, well-known furniture and appliance rental company that charged monthly fees to its clients that were usurious to say the least. Since this company had about 20 branches in the Portland area, and a bunch of employees, their monthly fees for membership to the BBB were quite substantial. (A couple of thousand dollars a month, when all was said and done.)
This company had HUNDREDS of complaints on file with the BBB at the time I signed them up. Once we got the company's first membership check in our hot little hands, that company's BBB "report" suddenly changed and they received what amounted to a good rating on the Bureau's call-in phone service. (People can call the BBB nationwide, and get an automated report on virtually any company.)
But this is standard operating procedure for ANY company that becomes a BBB member.
To explain this a bit more - the automated report for this particular company suddenly became warm and fuzzy after we got their money..."This company has been responsive to all complaints that have been filed against it...this company is a member of the Better Business Bureau...", etc.
So that's how the operation works. The BBB NEVER eliminates all complaints that are on file for a particular company (because they don't have to...there's more than one way to s
Untruthful, damaging speech is not protected.
If you're stupid enough to have not figured out that "freedom of speak" is constrained by context, and you wade into every malfeasance discussion on the wooden "freedom of speech" horse, you've exercised the most basic freedom of all: to open your mouth and make a fool of yourself.
In a small town, it's amusing to have a town drunk. In a large city, by the time enough drunks assemble together to make a skid row, it becomes a tedious affair. Unfortunately, slashdot offers security in numbers, so there's a permanent September surplus of town drunks to remind us of the peril of opening mouth before engaging brain. Imagine a world where every movie contains seven FBI warnings. Doesn't take much imagining, does it?
I also get pissed off about the IANAL meme. Why are we giving lip service to a profession who won't refactor their code base to the point where mere mortals can understand it? Most of the time, the lawyers themselves don't understand it, the difference being that after paying $300/hour for legal advice, you can sue your lawyer if the legal advice obtained is hopelessly incorrect (though you'll rarely succeed, and you stand to lose more than you'll gain).
In America, it seems everyone has the right to offer legal-sounding advice. And the other party (apparently, for reasons I find hard to justify) has the right to sue you if you fail to designate yourself IANAL, or otherwise club the tragically gullible or conniving reader with a clue stick. (Strangely difficult to tell those two groups apart. They seem to unite under the banner of "born complainers".)
It's the same deal with commercial endorsements. Speak away, but if you represent the firm in an official capacity, don't forget to add IANADTP: I am not a disinterested third party.
Even if you're not litigated, you'll still look like a tool if discovered. Unfortunately, on the internet, tools enjoy security in numbers, so I'm all for litigation whenever it can be managed. Generally speaking, prosecution against commercial astroturfing rarely culminates in a criminal conviction until the offense is large enough to make organized crime salivate. Estimating a population of 100,000 scumbags and tools, there might be 20 convictions a year, and only half of these where the punishment exceeds the reward (the ultra tools who didn't know when to stop, or got their noses too deep into the blow).
Even if this idiot loses his job over this (unlikely), I doubt he'll be long unemployed. It's not much of a career move for a guy like this to begin astroturfing penny stocks, and he has no apparent scruples against it.
I wish we could move this annoying IANAL meme into the browser. In the license agreement for the user agent, there would be a tick box "I am a gullible and/or conniving douche bag". For these people, the browser would add to every page rendered (in big red letters at both the top and the bottom) "The text contained on this page does not constitute legal advice unless the author explicitly identifies it as such and backs it up with legal credentials". Those of us who arrogantly tick this box off would rarely see the IANAL meme ever again. Good riddance if you ask me.