Your Anonymous OpenTable Reviews Will Soon Display Your First Name (engadget.com) 34
OpenTable's restaurant pages still feature a lot of reviews left by anonymous diners at the moment, but that will not be the case starting next month. From a report: The online restaurant reservation service is changing its policy around reviews so that they're not as anonymous -- and it's even applying the new rule retroactively. As BleepingComputer reports, it told users in an email that starting on May 22, it "will begin displaying diner first names and profile photos on all diner reviews." Further, "this update will also apply to past reviews."
"We've heard from you, our diners, that trust and transparency are important when looking at reviews," the company also said in its letter, insinuating that it's changing the way reviews work based on user feedback. As BleepingComputer says, it'll be easy to match a bad review with customer reservation records based on the user's first name and when the post was made. While that's not nearly as bad as Glassdoor publishing people's names alongside their employer reviews without consent, it could still be very uncomfortable for people who wanted to talk about bad experiences without the fear of not being welcomed back into a particular establishment.
"We've heard from you, our diners, that trust and transparency are important when looking at reviews," the company also said in its letter, insinuating that it's changing the way reviews work based on user feedback. As BleepingComputer says, it'll be easy to match a bad review with customer reservation records based on the user's first name and when the post was made. While that's not nearly as bad as Glassdoor publishing people's names alongside their employer reviews without consent, it could still be very uncomfortable for people who wanted to talk about bad experiences without the fear of not being welcomed back into a particular establishment.
anonymous you say... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Never put anything on the internet you wouldn't shout down the hallway."
It has a way of becoming public information.
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"If you put it on the Internet, it's not yours anymore." is the one I go by but it applies here too.
Copyright has always been wishful thinking backed exclusively by lawyers and those rich enough to afford them. (More relevant to the above sentence than the article itself)
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I think that's wrong, the internet is not inherently lawless, it only is so by a deliberate political choice going back to the early Al Gore/Bill Clinton days.
Corporations exist in meatspace, and must follow the laws where they are based. As the liberal world is slowly disappearing and gets replaced by lots of authoritarian states, you can expect each and every meatspace restric
Re: anonymous you say... (Score:2)
Wishful thinking
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The name and photo will be really you (Score:2)
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Or a photo from 30 years ago that looks nothing like them today, but if asked they can truthfully say that yes, it's a photo of them.
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The general public's response: "How much do we have to pay to see a dossier of random Joe Sixpack's or Jane Average's insane ramblings that we can then shame them for and deny them opportunities?"
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Still, now someone can write a script to pull all of the names and photos for any negative post and aggregate them from other sources around the net. The general public's response: "How much do we have to pay to see a dossier of random Joe Sixpack's or Jane Average's insane ramblings that we can then shame them for and deny them opportunities?"
All the more reason to use different user names and emails for various sites. If you are careful, no one will know you are a dog.
You gave them your name (Score:2)
Shouldn't have done that.
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I gave them a name, and according to the phone book it's actually a real one.
First name and profile picture? (Score:1)
While it is feasible that the last name could be gleaned from a reservation record, there are bound to be lot of people who would have the same name, meaning the next time a Brad Majors makes a reservation he isn't necessarily the same Brad Majors who left a scathing review and thus somehow deserves his soup to be pissed in. Having a profile picture as well ensures a positive identification and pretty much guarantees either a mysterious last second cancellation or food tampering.
That would result in anothe
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Consider:
1. The staff serve 100 cusomers a day. If there's 1 customer they don't like and treat poorly what does it matter? They don't own the restauruant and often get paid about minimum wage. Nasty customer is unlikely to give good tips and causes problems. If there are nasty customers they have a great incentive to treat them poorly so that they don't come back.If you can replace a nasty regular with a good regular that's a great exchange.
2. People do return after complaining. People love complaining! So
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> If there are nasty customers they have a great incentive to treat them poorly so that they don't come back
Try that in your job and see how long you keep it. The only exceptions would be something like the DMV which people have no choice but to use, no matter how shitty they are treated.
Yes, some customers are deliberate assholes, but a complaint, legitimate or otherwise, is no excuse for you being one as well.
> Some towns and neighborhoods have very few restaurants to choose from.
And people talk. If
First names are not anonymous (Score:2)
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Her name is literally a GUID !!!!
Completely understandable that you can't reveal it.
Relative to the Earth's population, I can't imagine there are many people with a unique full name, let alone a unique first or last name.
(Yes: you did restrict the set to the Internet.)
Then don't be a dick (Score:3)
This may be hard to believe, but sometimes leaving some constructive criticism actually helps someone (or a business) improve.
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But if you're not, a couple of things..
- I am not attractive to the opposite sex. I have been single most of my adult life.
- I have some credit card bills
- I consider myself to be average at best.
- Being friendly to people is not something that I use to lord over others. I do it because I want to do it.
- You are free to do you however you want. You don't have to follow anything some weird old dude on the inter
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You assume that all businesses are able to take constructive criticism, or even agree with you that your comment is constructive.
Have you seriously never met someone who defaults to, "OMFG, you disagree with me, you are literally worse than Hitler!"?
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You assume that all businesses are able to take constructive criticism, or even agree with you that your comment is constructive.
Have you seriously never met someone who defaults to, "OMFG, you disagree with me, you are literally worse than Hitler!"?
Oh, I have met many people that can't take criticism. In those cases, they are free to dismiss it. If I genuinely did not have a good experience, me saying "Hey, you could change x, y, or z, and it would make your business a lot better", is something that they are free to ignore.
However, if I come back again at some point, and the same issues are still present, there are always plenty of other places to go in the future, too. I don't eat out that often, so when I do, I want to make sure it's wor
definition required (Score:2)
As is often the case, this depends upon your definition of "dick". Yeah, I know, we're using the slang form and not some dude's name, but it still requires clarification.
Trigger warning: I'm not up to writing a novel-length post right now, so I'm going with the traditional "he" pronoun to avoid a whole pile of overly complex sentences, NOT to "be a dick" as you put it.
Is it "being a dick" to leave a bad review when the product/service is indeed sub-par? The operator of the business might well think so. He m
seymore (Score:2)
Just make a burner account. (Score:2)
It isn't that hard.
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It isn't that hard.
Normal people do not know the words you are saying there. "Burner account"? They don't even know what you mean by "make an account". They put their real first names and their Yahoo email on web sites they visit. It probably gets auto-filled, even.
Whatever it is you're suggesting, it sounds like it might be a criminal act. Or else it is some kind of analogy to leaving the oven on. Or maybe it's that you're burning the restaurant ("Good one! BURN!").
Just this afternoon I gave up trying to help one of my frien
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spot on
I can recommend to everyone to have at least one non-geek good friend. I'll reset your understanding of how "easy" tech actually is.
Quick fix (Score:2)
Change your name to Anonymous/Anonymous in the settings.
As long as another Anonymous doesn't show up and take your reservation you should be fine.
Really? (Score:2)
Who uses their real name for stuff like that?
People need to learn the Radio Shack lesson (Score:2)
Back in the 1970s and 80s, the old Radio Shack store chain in the USA routinely asked customers for personal info (name, address, phone#) when they checked out, even though nearly all were using cash and not buying any sort of extended warranties or anything. Most people, being polite and often having other things on their minds, simply complied without question and without even giving it a thought. This let Radio Shack build a gigantic database of customers long before anybody ever heard of Google or Faceb