I have all the social graces of a warthog, and when in high dudgeon, a passed off one at that. It may have escaped y'alls noticing but, somehow I doubt it. So if I end up on peeple I shall wear my dishonor with pride!
Slander-as-a-service: Peeple app wants people to rate and review you – whether you like it or not
This could be the most odious idea the internet manages in 2015: Peeple is an app that lets people rate other people, whether they like it or not, and plans to launch in November. The Yelp-like defamation-as-a-service – someone can put you in a database that you can't be taken off, rate you 1-to-5, and comment on you as a …
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Thursday 1st October 2015 06:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Wonder what will happen...
When the CEO finds herself on there and is torn to shreds by every involuntary participant?
I suspect you'll discover that the names of the executives get the Zuckerberg treatment: somehow, that won't be public.
Is the pool of innovation so far dried up that people have to go for crap that can ONLY cause harm? Given that this happening in the land of the
lawyersfree, I give this until it turns a bit of profit before it is sued into the ground for libel, forcing it to disclose downvoter identity.-
Thursday 1st October 2015 07:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Wonder what will happen...
"before it is sued into the ground for libel, "
The whole USP of this appalling site is that the US has almost no protection against libel other than extremely large amounts of money.
However, the fact remains that people will not merely be putting information on the site; they will be rating other people using methods provided by the site operators. To me that looks like an argument against common carrier.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 07:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Wonder what will happen...
The whole USP of this appalling site is that the US has almost no protection against libel other than extremely large amounts of money.
Good point, although I suspect that exactly the people that *have* that sort of money will appear on the site first, and I give it about 10 seconds live before this will go political. I'm willing to bet that one of the first people to appear on there will be Trump, and I want to watch that when he decides he doesn't like it - he's not exactly known for his gentle, diplomatic touch.
That's worth prepping popcorn for, I think, but I suspect you won't be halfway through the bag before the site is a smoking hole in the data centre :).
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Thursday 1st October 2015 09:30 GMT rh587
Re: Wonder what will happen...
"and I give it about 10 seconds live before this will go political. I'm willing to bet that one of the first people to appear on there will be Trump, and I want to watch that when he decides he doesn't like it - he's not exactly known for his gentle, diplomatic touch."
Apparently you add people using their phone number. They get an SMS informing them they have been added and is supposed to ensure that "you can only add and rate people you know".
Clearly the developers have never heard of doxxing. It may be 10 minutes before someone gets Trump on there rather than 10 seconds, but he'll end up there nonetheless.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 18:51 GMT Eddy Ito
Re: Wonder what will happen...
Don't forget the business model is selling out all the personal details of involuntary participants. If anybody ever hands my phone number to scum like this they are going to get a rather nasty phone call from me.
I also wonder what happens if they wind up flooded with wrong numbers. Heck I just got a phone call asking for someone named Jane, what if I get a text from this vinegar and water pair letting me know that Jane was just ratted on pee-pal? What recourse does poor Jane have?
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Thursday 1st October 2015 07:29 GMT Voland's right hand
What lawsuits
This is illegal in more than half of the world on basic data protection grounds, defamation law, libel law and god knows what else. It would take less than a day or two to get an injunction and a week to make it permanent to shut down a service like this in Europe on basic data protection grounds. The same goes for at least some USA states which have a basic resemblance of data protection legislation.
It will be interesting which jurisdiction will this operate in. I do not see it working in California and New England states. They all have legislation this runs afoul of.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 12:38 GMT Christoph
Re: What lawsuits
"but you can bet the terms and conditions will tell you the service will be covered by the laws of the State of California (or perhaps Delaware)."
But that is irrelevant. The person who signed up to those conditions is not the person being slandered. They can put whatever they like in the T&Cs but it makes not the slightest difference to the person suing them - except maybe proving that the site as well as the user is liable.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 06:18 GMT heyrick
Ha ha. "This video has been removed by its user". Deletion good enough for them; good enough for the rest of us.
I'd like to see how far the "covered by the laws of X" go when this app crashes into British libel law; especially given that you don't need to accept their Ts&Cs if somebody else can add you and rate you and you aren't even a user.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 06:35 GMT heyrick
Re: @heyrick
I'll reach for a bag of popcorn; as wouldn't some jurisdictions consider their app to be the entity publishing and disseminating the content in question, regardless of who put it there?
Another on Peeple enjoying the right to deletion: https://m.facebook.com/comment/replies/?ctoken=1052702411430776_1054608977906786&count=16&showcount=13&ft_ent_identifier=1052702411430776&gfid=AQCRXnMmugF4EZnk
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Thursday 1st October 2015 06:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Self-defence
>You can respond to a nasty-gram, but Peeple won't delete stuff just because it's unbiased, unfair, or flat-out untrue.
So a bit like the database used for DBS (CRB) checks then, or virtually any police database.
Wouldn't be surprised if it is a state funded site, what better way to fill your boots than getting other people to do it. Now what's the name of the head of my local police force, I hear he's been a naughty boy.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 08:47 GMT Teiwaz
Re: I may be sexist....
Certainly matches the criteria for really nasty vicious girls-school bullying and intimidation that often ends up with a suicide.
Pretty much the worst resulting idea formulated from the nastiest teenage vendetta impulses.
The women contemplating this are going to end up creating the kind of really damaging traumas of the like so far inflicted by the likes of revenge porn sites.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 12:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I may be sexist....
It's OK - we've disowned them already. Members of Homo sapiens they may allegedly be, but that's no reason to smear us women with the tar that those two creatures so richly deserve.
Their utterly anti-social creation falls firmly under the heading of 'just because you CAN do it doesn;t mean that you SHOULD'.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 19:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I may be sexist....
It's OK - we've disowned them already
LOL, I always thought "defrocking" to be an entirely different event :). He did put a joke icon on it anyway, and I think we can assume that members of either sex that attend this site have at least a functional sense of humour and a liking of the absurd :).
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Friday 2nd October 2015 20:11 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: I may be sexist....
"Their utterly anti-social creation falls firmly under the heading of 'just because you CAN do it doesn;t mean that you SHOULD'.
...but since it will make us rich, fuck'em, lets DO IT!!!
Maybe I've seen too much US TV and films, but they look like the stereo-type rich sorority girls who get everything handed to them on a plate and never, ever see any "bad stuff" because the world is just all pink and full of fluffy bunnies and pink unicorns and pink...erm...stuff. The sort who can hand out nasty put downs with a big creepy grin and then wonder why "other people" not part of "their" group get upset.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 08:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I may be sexist....
I may be sexist....
.... but why I'm not surprised this gossip app has been created by two women?
That has an uncanny resemblance to the "I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture" statement by Alex Carter-Silk so I hope that your post won't be seen by Charlotte Proudman (she of "I will publish this private conversation because I think he is sexist" fame)...
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Thursday 1st October 2015 07:34 GMT dan1980
The way Cordray defends/justifies the service by saying that "innovators are often put down because people are scared and they don’t understand" smack of the defence that so many cranks trot out: "they laughed at Einstein". (The Wright Brothers, Columbus, Galileo, etc . . .)
You're not "innovators" and the reason people are against your idea is not because they "don't understand"; you are taking an existing idea (ratings) and applying it to a different target (people rather than businesses) and the reason people think that's a rubbish idea is because it bloody well is.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 10:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Innovators are good when they conceive true new clever ideas that make life better. Innovating just for the sake of changing may lead to stupid or dangerous ideas. Even Jonathan Swift mocked innovators like those...
"persons went up to Laputa [...] came back with a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region: that these persons, upon their return, began to dislike the management of every thing below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics, upon a new foot."
You'd call that "disruptive", today....
"“That he had a very convenient mill within half a mile of his house, turned by a current from a large river, and sufficient for his own family, as well as a great number of his tenants; that about seven years ago, a club of those projectors came to him with proposals to destroy this mill, and build another on the side of that mountain, on the long ridge whereof a long canal must be cut, for a repository of water, to be conveyed up by pipes and engines to supply the mill, because the wind and air upon a height agitated the water, and thereby made it fitter for motion, and because the water, descending down a declivity, would turn the mill with half the current of a river whose course is more upon a level.” He said, “that being then not very well with the court, and pressed by many of his friends, he complied with the proposal; and after employing a hundred men for two years, the work miscarried, the projectors went off, laying the blame entirely upon him, railing at him ever since, and putting others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as well as equal disappointment.”"
(Gulliver's Travel, Part III, Chapter IV, Balnibarbi).
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Thursday 1st October 2015 12:46 GMT I ain't Spartacus
This reminds me of the DISC analysis that a corporate
bullshiterconsultant wanted to put everyone through. I'd not heard of that one, but it's similar to Myers Briggs, in that there's no scientific basis for it - but it's an amazing tool for sorting people into handy personality types so you can patronise them properly.Apparently if you retake the test a couple of days later, 50% of the time you'll get a totally different result.
Anyway the website of the company what do it has this little blurb about why the test is great, and not at all sinister, oh no. And it says something like, if people are against this test, it's probably because they feel they've got something to hide. Nice!
Still, at least they're just greedy and incompetent. They're not actively harmful, unlike this charming new website.
Sometimes I think we should have special cases were lawyers are banned in disputes, and the decision is completely down to the weight of numbers on each side, and how many iron bars they happened to have brought along. The owners of the site might find themselves slightly outnumbered...
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Thursday 1st October 2015 17:29 GMT Stoneshop
Lawyers
Sometimes I think we should have special cases were lawyers are banned in disputes, and the decision is completely down to the weight of numbers on each side, and how many iron bars they happened to have brought along. The owners of the site might find themselves slightly outnumbered...
A couple of lawyers won't make a difference regarding being outnumbered or not, but it'll be increasing the motivation on the side of the bar-wielders.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 09:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "This could be the most odious idea the internet manages in 2015"
"laugh-at-a-cripple.com?"
Considering how much television nowadays is the equivalent of just that - though mainly with intellectually or emotionally disabled people - it isn't much of a stretch.
Our ancestors visited Bedlam to laugh at the lunatics, we have Big Brother and its many, many offspring.
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Friday 2nd October 2015 11:19 GMT Turtle
@Arnaut the less re: "Laugh-At-A-Cripple.com"
"laugh-at-a-cripple.com"
Maybe I'm naive, but I actually tried to log on to that site. Turns out, very surprisingly, that it doesn't exist. Color me gobsmacked.
Well here's the cripples - emotional cripples, at any rate - that I'm laughing at: McCullough and Cordray. I hope this follows them around for the rest of their lives. Because it really says something about them as people, or as they might prefer to have it, peeple.
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Thursday 1st October 2015 08:37 GMT VinceH
I note from the Washington Post article that if someone doesn't sign up for Peeple, only positive reviews will appear for them - which sounds like the developers have tried (and failed) to address the obvious objection.
The reason they've failed to address the problem is because like everybody that is publishing personal details online, they are undoubtedly 100% confident that their servers are entirely secure and will never be prised open and the contents spewed out for everyone to see, including those negative reviews that haven't appeared on the system - and they will continue to be 100% confident of that... until it happens. (At which point, it will only have "affected a small number of people")
Another problem: They're using people's mobile phone numbers as a means to ensure a "reviewer" knows the person they're talking about (and presumably the same for anyone checking out the reviews - else how does someone distinguish between John Smith, John Smith, John Smith, and John Smith?)
Which is great... unless it's bloody easy for random people to get your mobile number, which for some of us it (necessarily) is.
The idiocy is strong in this one.