<story><title>Australian firm Meriton fined $3M for misleading consumers on TripAdvisor</title><url>https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/meriton-to-pay-3-million-for-misleading-consumers-on-tripadvisor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RileyJames</author><text>The precedent this sets is interesting. From my interpretation, a business must request reviews from all customers, via all methods, for each platform, in order to not be considered ‘manipulating consumers’.&lt;p&gt;This will have impacts for all the saas review management products, as their key selling point is usually: get more reviews from your happy customers, or stop your unhappy customers posting reviews.  Which is usually done by targeting or omitting either group.&lt;p&gt;Any Australian business using such product would now be on the hook.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spauka</author><text>As other commenters have pointed out below, the issue the ACCC took was not that they didn&amp;#x27;t request reviews from all customers, but rather that they specifically and actively excluded people who they suspected might have had bad experiences from a program where otherwise all other customers were included.&lt;p&gt;From the ruling [0]:&lt;p&gt;On a weekly basis, Meriton provided TripAdvisor with the email addresses of guests who had stayed at its properties and TripAdvisor sent email invitations to these guests to post a review. However, rather than sending TripAdvisor the email addresses of all guests who had stayed at its properties (other than those who had requested that their details not be provided), Meriton adopted the following two practices:&lt;p&gt;(a) The first practice was to add the letters “MSA” (which stand for Meriton Serviced Apartments) to the front of the email addresses of certain guests. This rendered the email address invalid. This practice was applied to guests who had made a complaint or were otherwise considered likely to have had a negative experience at a Meriton property. I will refer to this practice as the MSA-masking practice.&lt;p&gt;(b) The second practice was to withhold from TripAdvisor the email addresses of all the guests who had stayed at a property during a period of time when there had been a major service disruption (such as the lifts not working, no hot water, etc). I will refer to this practice as the bulk withholding practice.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.austlii.edu.au&amp;#x2F;cgi-bin&amp;#x2F;viewdoc&amp;#x2F;au&amp;#x2F;cases&amp;#x2F;cth&amp;#x2F;FCA&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;1305.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.austlii.edu.au&amp;#x2F;cgi-bin&amp;#x2F;viewdoc&amp;#x2F;au&amp;#x2F;cases&amp;#x2F;cth&amp;#x2F;FCA&amp;#x2F;2...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Australian firm Meriton fined $3M for misleading consumers on TripAdvisor</title><url>https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/meriton-to-pay-3-million-for-misleading-consumers-on-tripadvisor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RileyJames</author><text>The precedent this sets is interesting. From my interpretation, a business must request reviews from all customers, via all methods, for each platform, in order to not be considered ‘manipulating consumers’.&lt;p&gt;This will have impacts for all the saas review management products, as their key selling point is usually: get more reviews from your happy customers, or stop your unhappy customers posting reviews.  Which is usually done by targeting or omitting either group.&lt;p&gt;Any Australian business using such product would now be on the hook.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>Yeah, I&amp;#x27;m hoping there was just some info missing from the article, but this decision seems all sorts of fucked up.&lt;p&gt;All Trip Advisor Review Express really does automate the process of requesting reviews on Trip Advisor. It&amp;#x27;s not much harder to just email out requests to guests yourself. So is this decision saying if you only emailed requests to people who thought would give you a good review, but not a bad review, that you are guilty of something?&lt;p&gt;If so, literally 99% of businesses would be guilty of this. When someone calls to complain, every business tries to handle it in house. It&amp;#x27;s not like they say &amp;quot;Oh, I&amp;#x27;m sorry you had a bad experience, let me get you the contact info for BBB so you can complain to them, and be sure to post a bad review on our Facebook page!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;What about all those apps that pop up a dialog that says &amp;quot;Do you love our app?&amp;quot; and if you say yes it takes you to the app store, and if you say no it shows an internal complaint dialog?</text></comment>