More businesses are suing Yelp to unmask anonymous users, reports the Wall Street Journal. One such case is heading toward the Virginia Supreme Court this month.
As Angus Loten reports:
The Federal Trade Commission has received more than 2,046 complaints filed about Yelp from 2008 through March 4, according to data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, following a Freedom of Information Act request. Yelp shares fell 5.7% in Wednesday trading, after the tally was posted on FTC.gov.
Most of the complaints are from small businesses that claim to have received unfair or fraudulent reviews, often after turning down a pitch to advertise on the site, according to a separate spreadsheet of complaints to the FTC about Yelp, reviewed exclusively by the Journal. For instance, a business owner in Montclair, N.J., whose name was redacted said: “I was contacted by a Yelp salesperson to advertise, which I declined, and since have only had negative posts on their site.”
The proliferation of anonymous writers online is the result of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which frees website owners from any responsibility for what users post on their sites. Critics of the law, passed in 1996, say it has not kept up with the widespread use of the Internet. Free speech advocates also support anonymity online. As the WSJ observes, such cases are increasingly the topic of lawsuits.
Recently the New York-based hedge fund, Greenhorn Capital took legal action to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger at an investor website. Like many such companies, they plan to sue.
More and more often, a fresh batch of compromising emails threatens to torpedo a reputation, whether it’s Chris Christie staffers coordinating political retaliation, the swirl of exchanges that sparked the Petraeus scandal, or the embarrassing and costly boasting of former Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre.
These are some of the most egregious examples of the havoc that can ensue, but the risks of errant mails aren’t limited to top government offices and Wall Street skyscrapers. Nor are the dangers they pose anything new. Half of computer users “have accidentally sent a sensitive email to the wrong person” and “70 percent of businesses are concerned about sensitive material falling into the wrong hands as a result of data leakage via email.” Before you click that send button again, let’s take a look at what we’re up against, as well as some ways we can protect ourselves.
Data Leaks
One of the first things to keep in mind is that email isn’t as private as you might think, especially at work. “Even if your employer doesn’t have an email policy, it still probably has the legal right to read employee email messages sent using its equipment and network,” says attorney and author Lisa Guerin. Emails are often exposed in the course of investigations and trials. They can also be stolen by hackers, such as the recently-jailed Guccifer, whose exploits included posting paintings by George W. Bush, or Christopher Chaney, who’s serving time for hacking the email accounts of stars like Scarlett Johansson and Christina Aguilera. Then there are the major email providers, which often reserve the right to snoop on you in their privacy policies, and the NSA, which can probably intercept your messages.
Gone But Not Necessarily Completely
It’s also important to remember that, even though an email may be long gone from your inbox, that doesn’t mean it’s vanished completely. Those who’ve had their private messages go viral can attest to that. “E-mail, Twitter, texting and the rest all intuitively feel like short fuse ephemeral communications—a quick word in passing, if you will,” explains former British intelligence officer John Bassett in an article on India’s NDTV.com. “Yet as soon as we push the send button, these communications take on an enduring digital permanence that means that in effect they never quite go away.”
Hedge fund Greenlight Capital has filed a petition in New York State Supreme Court seeking the identity of an anonymous blogger at Seeking Alpha, an investor website. In mid-February Bloomberg published a report stating the contributor “allegedly disclosed the fund’s stake in Micron Technology Inc. (MU) before it was made public.” Greenlight plans to sue the blogger if the petition succeeds – making it a potentially groundbreaking legal case.
Key excerpts from the Bloomberg article state:
Greenlight said in a Nov. 25 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it purchased 23 million shares of Boise, Idaho-based Micron, a maker of memory chips, in the third quarter. Eleven days earlier, Greenlight had disclosed the stake to the SEC and asked that the agency not publicly identify Micron as the investment in question.
A frequent contributor to the site, identified only as “Valuable Insights,” revealed the investment in a post on Nov. 14, before Greenlight disclosed its position to the SEC, the investment manager said in a petition filed yesterday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The hedge fund said in the petition that the website post drove up its costs.
Greenlight said in the petition it intends to sue “Valuable Insights,” identified on the site as a fund manager with more than 20 years of experience in the securities industry.
Seeking Alpha declined to identify the contributor in a letter dated Nov. 26, saying that submissions are made at the “sole responsibility” of the posting user, according to filings in the case.
Seeking Alpha said in the letter that it doesn’t pre-screen comments on its site and can’t guarantee their accuracy, integrity or quality, and that it’s not in a position to reveal its users’ identities without “clear and substantial grounds,” according to the filings.
Why it is difficult to sue for internet content….but not impossible
Website operators have legal immunity over what is said and posted on their sites. That means they are not held responsible for it in a court of law (except, generally, in cases that constitute defamation). Specifically, according to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” That law was passed in 1996.
Online defamation lawsuits constitute a growing area in legal practice. If something posted about a person is deemed by a court to be a false and unprivileged statement of fact harmful to someone’s reputation – or, to cite recent cases, is “injurious,” interferes with one’s livelihood or possesses any number of related characteristics – the website can be required by law to remove the information and reveal the poster’s identity.
Tim Fernholz at Quartz said, “The hedge-fund manager maintains that only someone who was legally obligated to keep the information confidential could have written the Seeking Alpha post, and he wants to know the person’s true identity in order to sue. Since the author of the note isn’t a journalist relaying information from an anonymous source (a classic way big deals are leaked) but an investor, it’s possible the judge won’t follow the usual protections for anonymous speechand instead force Seeking Alpha to divulge the author’s identity,” he writes.
People who have successfully sued in response to online defamation (typically a series of anonymous posts about them) have been awarded millions of dollars in damages. The posters’ identities have become public, often in the news media. It can be very difficult to take such a step and succeed. But a firm like Greenlight Capital has the financial weight to see such a lawsuit through. While it is not a defamation suit, there may be similarities in terms of visibility. Greenlight can also utilize private resources to reveal the anonymous writer should legal channels fail to do so.
Cyber investigators increasingly active in private sector
Private investigators are increasingly active in such cases. Often such experts come out of law enforcement and the legal community. For instance, Kenneth Citarella is the Managing Director for Investigations and Cyber Forensics at Guidepost Solutions, an investigations and compliance firm that was established by Andrew J. O’Connell, a former federal prosecutor and Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service.
In January we shared some tips for publishing and editing pages on Wikipedia. Now the popular crowd-sourced encyclopedia may soon enact a significant change to the disclosure it requires from its editors.
The Wikimedia Foundation “is proposing an amendment to the online encyclopedia’s terms of use that would address further undisclosed paid editing,” writes PRWeek’s Diana Bradley, who spoke with the foundation about the proposal:
The purpose of the proposal is to provide clear guidance on how editors can disclose potential conflicts in compliance with Wikipedia’s existing prohibitions on deception, misrepresentation, and fraud, according to Jay Walsh, communications consultant and adviser to the Foundation.
The amendment would also inform users about the potential legal ramifications of undisclosed paid editing and about existing community policies that may go above and beyond this baseline requirement, he explained.
Writing for Forbes, Michael Humphrey calls the amendment a “notable, and I think noble, attempt to fight back the practice of glossing entries with slanted versions of reality” and “the kind of transparency that be a model for many content companies.”
Moving forward
Contributing to Wikipedia “to serve the interests of a paying client while concealing the paid affiliation has led to situations that the community considers problematic,” according to the amendment’s introduction. The practice is only one of many issues the online encyclopedia faces. Some organizations have noted the huge gender gap among Wikipedia’s contributors. “Today’s bunch are 90% male and mostly from rich countries,” according to a recent article in The Economist. The Atlantic Cities’ Emily Badger examines a study that highlights similar problems, writing that “Wikipedia has a geography of its own, and in many ways, it’s a biased reflection of the real world.”
The amendment shows a maturation of Wikipedia’s platform, as it tries to evolve and adapt to the online encyclopedia’s growing popularity and impact. It’s also part of a broader trend toward developing interlinked online identities that facilitate more transparency and honesty, albeit less online privacy. William Beutler of the firm Beutler Ink tells PRWeek: “I do not think Wikipedia’s rules have been clear in the past, so any move that can be made by the Foundation or the community itself to clarify rules of engagement to editors or interested outsiders is a good thing.”
The identity of the mystery tweeter @GSElevator has been exposed. For three years, the Twitter account has entertained over 500,000 followers with witty, profane one-liners reportedly overheard in the elevators at Goldman Sachs.
Fake Twitter identities proliferate online. So do imposter and parody accounts. @GSElevator’s profile page has a thumbnail picture of Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein and this profile description:
Things heard in the Goldman Sachs elevators do not stay in the Goldman Sachs elevators. Email what you hear to elevatorgoldman@gmail.com.
Andrew Ross Sorkin broke the story.
“The Twitter account, which has an audience of more than 600,000 followers, has been the subject of an internal inquiry at Goldman to find the rogue employee. The tweets, often laced with insider references to deals in the news, appeal to both Wall Street bankers and outsiders who mock the industry. Late last month, the writer sold a book about Wall Street culture based on the tweets for a six-figure sum,” he reported.
Donald Trump has won a cybersquatting lawsuit against a man who developed four parody websites using his name. The sites published anonymous “commentary, often disparaging, on Trump and his television shows,” according to CNN.
Such practices have proliferated on the Internet for years. Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are also used for cybersquatting. Celebrities and other public figures are a common focus of such sites. So are CEOs and other high-profile executives.
Many “domainers,” as the instigators are known, purchase unsecured domain names with the intent of charging high fees to sell them back to their victims. Creating parody sites can be a ploy to force them to do so faster. Victims often feel they have little recourse over the situation or don’t want to take legal action that would attract publicity.
Trump’s attorneys used the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act as the basis of their suit, which was filed in March 2013. (The sites were created in 2007.) The law permits damages of up to $100,000 for each unauthorized domain. In this instance, the court ruled that the domainer must pay $32,000 in damages.
At midnight last Thursday, Beyoncé put her own stamp on social media marketing. She bypassed the traditional music industry marketing machine and released a brand new album directly to her fans — on Instagram. Her team was so successful in avoiding leaks that it was a complete surprise.
Ben Sisario reported the unexpected release in The New York Times:
“The release of a blockbuster album has historically come with a few standard marketing moves. Flood the radio with an early single. Book as many TV appearances as possible. Line up partnerships with big retailers and consumer brands.
But at midnight on Thursday, when Beyoncé released her latest album, she did none of those things. Instead, she merely wrote, “Surprise!” to her more than eight million Instagram followers, and the full album — all 14 songs and 17 videos of it — appeared for sale on iTunes.
The stealth rollout of the album, “Beyoncé,” upended the music industry’s conventional wisdom, and was a smashing success.”
The Take Away for Traditional Business Leaders
What can more traditional C.E.O.’s and other business leaders take away from Beyoncé’s successful stealth move? The most important is that social media is a tool that enables users to take ownership of their message.
In online reputation management, the more control you have over the information about your brand online, the more well-balanced your online image is. If it is authentic, interesting and informative, it will have credibility.
Using social media to communicate directly to the public, with no filter of spokesperson or other third parties, enables your message to be viewed exactly as you intend it to be. You still can’t change how the media, critics and consumers respond, but you have complete management over what, how and when you introduce what you want them to know. That results in a more authentic picture of your point of view – one that is less easily skewed by others. It also enables a message that the media can use — including national news outlets.
In more traditional corporate cultures, doing this requires the participation of a lot of team members – including risk, compliance and legal officers. So planning such strategies and having them in your playbook before you need them, is a good strategy for 2014.
Recent revelations about the NSA’s social media mining and analytic system have attracted much controversy. Many people don’t realize that a growing number of private companies use many of the same methods and have similar capabilities.
Such companies sell information to clients ranging from law enforcement and security companies to human resources departments and corporate intelligence firms. So it is critical to give some thought to strategies for managing your social media and other online activity. That is, if you are concerned with that activity (and your contacts) being collected, analyzed and possibly provided in reports to current or prospective employers, clients, partners and others.
Online investigative firms offer services ranging from basic social media screening, identification and verification to more extensive analysis and investigation, encompassing public records reports, deep Internet searches, social network mapping, activity monitoring, and resume vetting. On a broader scale, data from social media accounts and other online sources are also frequently scraped by automated bots, then aggregated and published by websites such as Intelius.com and USSearch.com.
Protecting your privacy
One way to protect your personal information is to stay off of social media entirely, or to limit your presence to a single trusted platform like LinkedIn. You can minimize the information that data mining companies obtain, while gaining greater control over what you do and don’t want to make available online.
Such a simple solution will work for some, but if abstaining from social media isn’t a viable option, a deliberate and cautious approach to managing your online image is necessary. Develop an appropriate strategy for managing your presence across all the platforms that you use.
Given the “new generation of programs that ‘revolutionize’ data collection and analysis” that are described by the New York Times, it’s also important to take a close look at what you may be revealing on social media in less obvious ways, such as through your network of connections, location metadata, and anything else that could be combined with public records and other available information to glean details about you. These pieces of data may seem obscure or inconsequential on their own, but with the advanced capabilities of the NSA and many private intelligence firms, you may be sharing more than you ever intended.
