TripAdvisor And The Big Business Of Fake Reviews, Part 1

On reflection, TripAdvisor may at first appear to be a benevolent site where regular people share their honest travel opinions. Dig beneath the surface, however, and you will find something quite the opposite is happening at TripAdvisor. This is big business and the going is rough in today’s economic climate.
There are over twenty million reviews on TripAdvisor. I believe that a fast-growing percentage of them (perhaps now as many as one-third) are fake.
What’s a fake review? A review written by someone connected with a hotel (or other business) to boost its appeal, or a negative review written by a competitor (or a disgruntled party) to lower a hotels’ standing.
To prove this point, The London Times wrote and submitted six glowing reviews, all fake, on hotels considered among the worst in London. TripAdvisor posted all six reviews without ever commenting on the discrepancy.
It just goes to show you have to be careful who you trust and not take anything at face value. The fast-growth of fraudulent reviews makes it imperative that we come to a site like TripAdvisor with a fairly high level of skepticism in order to come away with the honest information we desire.
Trust and TripAdvisor may no longer go together. Here’s why:
Surveys have shown that the vast majority of us have come to trust user reviews. Lack of review credibility, however, has started to seriously erode trust at TripAdvisor and at other review sites.
TripAdvisor, a unit of Expedia, obviously serves first and foremost to further their global travel marketing business. TripAdvisor makes money through their affiliate (link click) program and through advertisements. The value of that marketing business is in no small part based on the number of reviews as well as the number of visitors to the site. Reducing the number of visitors and reviews in order to limit the amount of fraud will likely also have significant negative financial impact on their marketing.
The travel industry is in most serious financial trouble. Competition in order to stay in business is cut-throat. The need to achieve top ranking in user-generated reviews such as on TripAdvisor is intense.
In part two tomorrow, I’ll cover:
Exactly how important TripAdvisor reviews are in the travel industry.
The role of public relations firms in fake reviews.
TripAdvisor’s point of view.
Suggestions for how to make TripAdvisor and other review sites continue to work for you.
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Skype messages being monitored in China, group says

Tom-Skype, a joint venture in China between eBay's Skype unit and Tom Online, has been known to operate a text filter on text chats, but a new report says that the data is stored insecurely and the text messages and records containing personal data can be easily accessed.
Tom-Skype regularly scans text chat messages for politically sensitive keywords, and stores them insecurely, according to a study by researchers in Canada.
Read the latest WhitePaper - Network Seismology: How Metcalfe's Law Is Driving the Demand for a New Breed of Network Monitoring Probes
If the keywords are present, the text messages and records containing personal information, are stored on insecure publicly-accessible servers together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data, according to a joint report by The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, and The SecDev Group in Ottawa.
The report, called "Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China's Tom-Skype platform", does not directly implicate the Chinese government, though it suggests this surveillance is yet another instance of corporate complicity with the Chinese authorities.
It raises troubling questions regarding how these practices are related to the Chinese government's censorship and surveillance policies, said the report by Nart Villeneuve, a fellow at the Citizen Lab. The captured messages contain keywords relating to topics considered sensitive to the Chinese government such as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party of China.
Villeneuve was able to view, download, and archive millions of private communications, ranging from business transactions to political correspondence, along with their identifying personal information, according to the report.
Besides being driven by keywords, the surveillance system may also be capturing messages using other criteria, such as user names, the report said.
A Skype spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement on Thursday that the security flaw had been fixed, after Skype informed Tom about the flaw. The flaw did not affect the vast majority of Skype users outside of China, she added.
Tom Group did not not respond to an e-mail requesting its comments on the new report.
The idea that the Chinese government might be monitoring communications in and out of the country shouldn't surprise anyone, and in fact, it happens regularly with most forms of communication such as e-mails, traditional phone calls, and chats between people within China and between people communicating to people in China from other countries, the spokeswoman said.
more info-->>Skype messages being monitored in China, group says - Network World