Another firm caught gaming Amazon product reviews |
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Another firm caught gaming Amazon product reviews
Another day, another dustup over Amazon reviews. New York Times tech columnist David Pogue has a blog post today that pieces together how employees of Carbonite, an online backup service for photos and documents, apparently generated phony 5-star reviews of their company's products on Amazon.com in 2006.
Pogue doesn't hold back, writing:
It doesn’t matter to me that Carbonite’s fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old. These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves.
The post was later updated with comments from Carbonite CEO David Friend, who responded:
These ‘reviews’ on Amazon from 2006 should have sourced the authors as Carbonite employees. I will personally see that the reviews are updated to disclose their employment affiliation. Had they been brought to my attention, they would have been removed long ago. We do have a policy about such things. I apologize to anyone who was mislead by these postings.
Just last week, reports surfaced that an employee of Belkin, an electronics gadget firm, recruited people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to write positive reviews of the company's products in exchange for payment, prompting an apology from that company's president.
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