Fakespot is one of the more atrocious extensions when it comes to data collection. It sends everything you look at, everything you add to cart, while you are logged out of everything it will also persistently track your viewed items with a unique identifier. I understand that the below may be in PP/ToS but come on, a normal user will not.
It does a lot of things completely opaque to the normal end user that are well above a "please tell me if item X's reviews are good or bad" - it practically sends Fakespot almost every single page interaction or click that you do on an Amazon property.
It does the same on every other site it supports - whether or not you want your item inspected, it will notify Fakespot about what products you viewed, what browser, what you clicked on, Add to Cart or Buy Now clicks, Sort clicks, every product visible on page (by ID and seller).
They also use the same unique session identifier across sites, so items you look at on eBay/Walmart/etc can be tied to the same person as items viewed on Amazon. If you choose to try to opt out of automatic item detection, that choice is also sent back to their servers (where it then returns a 4xx and tells you to sign up or sign in to fakespot with an account to save settings).
The extension itself is many megabytes of heavily packed and obfuscated JS. If you have it installed, I would recommend not doing so.
The full Chrome privacy page - this is absolutely nuts for a review comparator:
Fakespot Fake Amazon Reviews and eBay Sellers collects the following:
Personally identifiable information
For example: name, address, email address, age, or identification number
Authentication information
For example: passwords, credentials, security question, or personal identification number (PIN)
Location
For example: region, IP address, GPS coordinates, or information about things near the user’s device
Web history
The list of web pages a user has visited, as well as associated data such as page title and time of visit
User activity
For example: network monitoring, clicks, mouse position, scroll, or keystroke logging
Website content
For example: text, images, sounds, videos, or hyperlinks
In the year before the date this policy was issued, on the Services we may have collected the following categories of California Information:
Address and other identifiers -- such as name, postal address, zip code, email address, account name, payment card numbers, or other similar identifiers
Unique and online identifiers -- such as IP address, device IDs, or other similar identifiers
Characteristics of protected classifications -- such as race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation
Commercial information -- such as products or services purchased, obtained, or considered, or other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies
Internet, gaming or other electronic network activity information -- such as browsing history, search history and information regarding an individual's interaction with an internet website, application, or advertisement
Professional or educational Information
Biometric information
Location information -- (e.g. if you access our Sites on your mobile device we may collect Information about your device's precise location.)
Online viewing activities (e.g. pages viewed)
Inferences drawn from California Information, such as individual profiles, preferences, characteristics, behaviors.
The bonus shit cherry on top: they claim they require your address, GPS coordinates, passwords, browsing history, purchase history, and personal information
under "GDPR Legitimate Interest" in the privacy policy.
They process no payments and have no fraud to speak of, because it's not a thing.
So many people on HN complaining about privacy, but then come to the comments section to defend an extension that literally collects and sells everything you do. Seems a tad ironic.
I don't think it's ironic. We can be opposed to privacy-infringing apps/corporations and be opposed to centralization and censorship at the same time.
What this fakespot (i had no idea it existed until today) is doing is NOT different from what apple/google/facebook and other data brokers are doing. I'm horrified it exists and would gladly participate in setting those corporations on fire, but at the same time i'm even more horrified when they destroy their own competition in the name of protecting us users, because it's a shameful hypocrisy.
It's basically like the police killing random citizens (mostly not those who are white/rich) then saying they have a monopoly on legitimate violence. The first situation is already terrible, but that they fight competition in their crimes against humanity is all the more reason to dismantle these entities.
Why is everyone here just blaming Amazon? Of course they're going to ask Apple to do this. It's in their own self-interest.
The more interesting questions is, why is Apple complying? Are they afraid that Amazon will retaliate by pulling their apps out of the App Store? If so, are they really just going to keep prioritizing big tech connections in favor of it's own customers?
The rule cited is so vague that even a basic paid browser app would break it. All the app does is augment data available from any web browser with other data.
> 5.2.2 Third-Party Sites/Services: If your app uses, accesses, monetizes access to, or displays content from a third-party service, ensure that you are specifically permitted to do so under the service’s terms of use. Authorization must be provided upon request.
You have a multi billion monster on one side and a teeny tiny app on the other side.
I don’t think Apple is afraid of Amazon or anyone else. It just makes sense to side with a fellow Goliath than with some unknown app. There is no upside in siding with fakespot. It is highly unethical, but otherwise it is just business as usual
This is so depressing. Fakespot is an amazing app, I never buy anything off of Amazon without using it. Actions like this caused me to trust Amazon significantly less.
I used it for a while until it got me wondering - what, exactly, is their business model? And why do I trust their judgement on how reliable reviews are?
This is not to say that Amazon reviews are generally good, just saying that Fakespot might have an incentive to... tune their reviews of reviews :) so where's the Fakespot of Fakespot?
Considering FS is free and they are hiring, they must have some sort of monetization roadmap. My bet is either they become paid, they do paid whitelisting, or they provide some sort of sales intelligence to sellers. The first option is the best case scenario. In the latter cases, akin to Facebook, the actual customer would be sellers, charged based on the number of active users FS promises.
ReviewMeta, on the other hand, is clearly donation based, and also seems more honest at the moment (e.g., not claiming to be some sort of “trusted advisor”, showing a big warning that it’s adjusted score is only an estimation).
Monetization could be selling training data to big Amazon sellers on sentiment analysis of products. Or they just start whitelisting products, kinda like adblock does the "acceptable ads" we now have acceptable garbageproducts.
Well, they heavily promote their browser extension[1] (at least for me, when I hit their homepage). The addon gets access to your browser tabs and website data. Their privacy policy grants them access to serve you targeted ads based on information you share with the service, so that seems like it would be their monetization strategy.
Looks like they aren’t generating any revenue yet.
According to crunchbase they received a 5.3m USD series A funding so far, which is gonna keep the company running for quite a while with less than ten employees.
They most likely are trying to get users first, and then look money printing opportunities later.
I've posted a similar comment before, but on what basis do you trust fakespot? If they were being paid to promote or even outright manipulate the analysis how would we know? Or how would they be immune to the same review manipulation by sellers that Amazon is prone to? Why do you think we don't need a fakespot for fakespot too?
Idk is that very useful? There will dubious reviews on any popular product. Isn't the true utility in fakespot that it makes a decision on the credibility of the overall rating of the product for you based on some aggregation of the total reviews? That's what I'm questioning whether or not can be manipulated or tammpered with, in which case we'd be back at the same problem fakespot tries to solve requiring a fakespot for fakespot reviews
Have you used reviewmeta? If so how does it compare to Fakespot in terms of accuracy?
It was recommeded along with fakespot by some users for identifying fake amazon reviews when it was asked on my problem validation platform[1].
Amazon says,
> According to Amazon, the company already has the necessary tools to identify and stop fake reviews, suggesting that third-party services that claim to do this “are mostly wrong.”
If that was the case, People wouldn't be actively looking for solutions.
These days it seems Apple is begging to be regulated. So much stuff where they either let through scams or boot off legitimate apps on a whim. If anyone followed the news in the EU, Vestager is openly discussing to do so. They should rather make a halfhearted step themselves to open up their platform or they will be forced to do a full step themselves. That's my prediction, as states start to realize the abusive practices Apple is currently using.
I feel notably unfree on an Apple product, which amazes me because my reference is Google products. The thing which struck me was when I tried to watch a film I've had on my PC hard drive for what must be 5 years now, but Apple won't let VLC ship the codec.
I think I tried the free version of infuse and some other one, neither worked.
This is also ignoring that Apple don't deem it useful for you to be able to rename file extensions, which wouldn't have been a problem if I hadn't copied it as a .vkm instead of mkv
I've posted a similar comment before, but on what basis do you trust fakespot? If they were being paid to promote or even outright manipulate the analysis how would we know? Or how would the be immune to the same review manipulation by sellers that Amazon is prone to? Why do you think we don't need a fakespot for fakespot too?
If you look at my post history the quality of products has been going down, and we (as a fam) have reduced our AZ spend from 10k/yr (literally buying everything from there) a few years ago down to about 500-1000/yr in the past year. Prime Video was a sticky factor, but wife's come to grips with saying goodbye to that as well.
I just hadn't made the call. This is what radicalized me.
Note that reviewmeta was recently sold to a new operator, so we'll see how trustworthy it continues to be. Some interesting data on financials and revenue models here:
Ultimately it's user choice. If they are grown up enough to trust Amazon, they should be allowed to trust Fakespot. It's these big companies 'keeping us safe' and making choices for us that's the problem. They only have your wallet in mind, everything else is BS
I wonder what's in it for Amazon. FS users would end up buying on Amazon anyway. It's just that they would choose another seller or alternative products. Why would Amazon want that gone?
That's overly-dramatic. It's not that difficult to leave the iOS ecosystem. There's adequate tools for exporting data for emails+contact.
If you want to move to Android, you'll have to buy a new device and spend maybe $100 on apps, but most services support both platforms. Yes it'll suck to lose that one "killer app", but there's likely alternatives that are almost as good.
I'd wager it's harder for the HN audience. They'd have many more services they need to update account info with, or apps they'll need to find parallels for.
Most regular users use a small number of services (Facebook, reddit, whatever) and that will be available across both platforms.
Something like exporting email from one account to another will be more difficult for the regular user, but there's many guides available online. Or more realistically, a nephew to do it for them.
In fact I’d wager that a substantial number of regular people would move between iPhone and android without ever realising that they were convenience benefits in sticking with the same platform, other than basic familiarity with a particular user interface.
Similarly, I’m sure there are plenty of people who continue going to a McDonald’s drive-thru instead of a competitors’ because they are comfortable with and familiar with the menu. Yeah no one would accuse McDonald of having any amount of “platform” lock in.
Mirrors on the ceiling / The pink champagne on ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"
And in the master's chambers / They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives But they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember / I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
"Relax," said the night man / "We are programmed to receive
You can check-out any time you like / But you can never leave!"
I know this is unrelated to reviews, but I got a product shipped by and from Amazon 2 weeks ago that was missing its original box but instead was in an unmarked box that still had a shipping label addressed to Amazon returns on it.
Amazon gives so few shits about product quality it's baffling
They give so few shits because we keep using them despite everything they do. The people need to put their money elsewhere for Amazon to get their act together.
I’m kinda confused about this. At Amazon’s size it’s easier for them to do this and then just fix mistake after the fact. Amazon has sent me the wrong items, lost them, had stuff damaged but always always fixed it immediately when I call support.
I can’t honestly blame them for errors when they do so much business that 1 in a million problems happen daily.
The third-party API rule is the most baffling in all of Apple’s App Store regulations. It’s ridiculous that you can’t make and monetise alternative clients to popular services, as if the first party client is always going to be the best.
Related note: Apple is adding WebExtensions to iOS 15 (and iPadOS 15). Given that many extensions exist specifically to do exactly what this rule prohibits, I can imagine Apple's going to see a lot of user and developer protests as more and more extensions are brought over.
So does Amazon's HTTP API for browser clients. Is Apple going to snuggle up with Amazon and get the Brave browser banned for nuking their ads, trackers, etc?
> According to Amazon, the company already has the necessary tools to identify and stop fake reviews, suggesting that third-party services that claim to do this “are mostly wrong.”
I am certainly willing to believe that Amazon has all the necessary tools, but it's very clear that they don't care to use them.
I was briefly in contact with folks in a team at Amazon who said they were working on fixing the fake review problem. I ultimately didn't pursue a role there because I just don't really trust Amazon as an employer. (I worked there previously and got burned badly.)
Incidentally, I had also been in contact with Facebook about a role "combatting abuse" across their services. That loop was a bait and switch for standard ML (eg, improve video recommendations for users to keep their eyeballs on FB).
I try to assume good intentions, but I'm constantly given evidence that there are no good intentions in these companies. I don't think Amazon really has any reason to combat fake reviews. And I know a good number of engineers and scientists there. It's a tractable problem.
People have been saying this for a number of years, now, and Amazon only grows faster. Tools like this may have actually contributed to that growth, since they make shopping on Amazon safer, ironically.
I don’t agree. The advantage both had/have is a level of scale and brand inertia which makes it financially near-impossible for alternatives to grow large enough to compete.
I dont know how, but I assume that all the fake shit being sold on amazon is very profitable for them. I assume they have a strong motivation to protect and foster all the fake shit, cus that's what they appear to be doing to the best of their ability (Reminds me of 'content-farm' videos on youtube)
.
Also, If its not profit, there must be some 'perverse incentive' at some level of the company to act as they do.
It also raises the question, "Why can't there be substitute apps/services on the Apple App store?"
So what if Amazon can or even does do it? There should be multiple apps offering the same service available to Apple customers. This doesn't make sense.
That isn't their argument. They are arguing that any results that differ from their own ratings are false by definition because it is duplicative. If fakespot always gave the identical ratings, they'd have to make a different argument.
Amazon doesn't officially acknowledge that any specific product listings are fakes. An app that exposes the truth will naturally be different from what Amazon claims.
Product listing hijacks have been a known problem for years... and you can still do it today. A lot of the time I get something it comes with a business card offering a discount for a positive review... aliexpress reviews seem more reliable at this point.
I'm just done with Amazon. Haven't bought anything from them in at least a year. Between the counterfeits and their unwillingness to address that problem or the fake reviews, they are just not trustworthy.
Had they moved quickly and decisively I probably would have given them another chance.
Google Play has the same rule about accessing third party APIs and actually had it before Apple (I know because I’m perma banned from Google Play Development for violating this rule with an app I did)
My small business manufactures the product in the link below and sells it on Amazon. It has over 1000 reviews and on my honor I have never purchased or posted a fake review anywhere including Amazon.
Out of curiosity can one or two readers with the Fakespot App go to my product page and see what the App reports. Preferably two people, just to see if there is randomness to the result. This assumes you can still use an app that has been removed from the App store. Or is it automatically deleted from your phone ?
With the extension, you get an A on one and a ? on another.
I don't believe Fakespot's ratings are useful, though, because for other sites I've gotten for a negative-feedback seller "seller is RELIABLE and APPROVED BY FAKESPOT" when the API response consists entirely of "Seller has a return policy" and nothing else.
If you go on eBay for example, any seller that says "accepts returns" will automatically be flagged trustworthy.
Curious to how this will play. Even more interesting if it ever goes to court. Both Apple and Amazon are under a lot of regulatory pressure these days and this arrow flies through the heart of both cases.
It does a lot of things completely opaque to the normal end user that are well above a "please tell me if item X's reviews are good or bad" - it practically sends Fakespot almost every single page interaction or click that you do on an Amazon property.
It does the same on every other site it supports - whether or not you want your item inspected, it will notify Fakespot about what products you viewed, what browser, what you clicked on, Add to Cart or Buy Now clicks, Sort clicks, every product visible on page (by ID and seller).
They also use the same unique session identifier across sites, so items you look at on eBay/Walmart/etc can be tied to the same person as items viewed on Amazon. If you choose to try to opt out of automatic item detection, that choice is also sent back to their servers (where it then returns a 4xx and tells you to sign up or sign in to fakespot with an account to save settings).
The extension itself is many megabytes of heavily packed and obfuscated JS. If you have it installed, I would recommend not doing so.