Tag: $600,000
Mercenary RPG Wartales has sold over 600,000 copies
FTC fines supplement maker $600,000 for ‘review hijacking’ Amazon listings
For the first time, the US Federal Trade Commission has fined an organization for “review hijacking.” In February, the agency accused The Bountiful Company, maker of the Nature’s Bounty brand of vitamins, of deceiving consumers. Between 2020 and 2021, Bountiful abused a feature of Amazon to make it seem like some of its newer supplements had higher product reviews and ratings than they did in reality.
If you have ever bought something on Amazon, you’ve almost certainly interacted with the feature Bountiful attempted to game. Some listings include a set of icons that highlight different “variations” of that same product. For example, if you visit the page for Sony’s popular WH-1000XM5, the feature will highlight that the headphones are available in three different colors. By design, Amazon designed this feature to be narrow. Sellers are supposed to use it to showcase that a product they offer is available in a different color, size, quantity or flavor.
That’s not what The Bountiful Company did. According to the FTC, Bountiful used the feature to give newer products a boost from older, more well-established ones with different formulations. In one internal email the agency obtained, Bountiful lamented that “people did not love” one of its new vitamins but noted sales “spiked the second we variated the pages and they continue to grow.”
On Monday, the FTC said it voted unanimously to approve a consent order that carries a $600,000 fine for Bountiful and bars the company from employing such tactics in the future. “Boosting your products by hijacking another product’s ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising,” said Samuel Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
“There’s no place for fraud in Amazon’s store. We have proactive measures in place to prevent listing abuse and we continuously monitor our store,” an Amazon spokesperson told Engadget. “Our policies prohibit reviews abuse including offering incentives like gift cards to write positive reviews. We suspend, ban, and take legal action against those who violate these policies and remove inauthentic reviews.”
According to Amazon, “more than 99 percent” of the products people view on its marketplace “contain only authentic reviews.” If you find what you think is a fake review, the company recommends tapping the “Report” button so it can investigate and take action. The spokesperson added Amazon would continue working with FTC and other enforcement agencies to combat fraudsters.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ftc-fines-supplement-maker-600000-for-review-hijacking-amazon-listings-210142185.html?src=rss
Hyundai and KIA Recall Nearly 600,000 Vehicles over Fire Risks
We have bad news if you’re the proud owner of select Hyundai or KIA vehicles. The two companies have issued a recall on over a half million cars, instructing owners to park outside due to a tow hitch harness problem that could lead to vehicles catching fire.
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Meta sues surveillance company for allegedly scraping more than 600,000 accounts
Meta has filed a lawsuit against Voyager Labs, which it has accused of creating tens of thousands of fake accounts to scrape data from more than 600,000 Facebook users’ profiles. It says the surveillance company pulled information such as posts, likes, friend lists, photos, and comments, along with other details from groups and pages. Meta claims that Voyager masked its activity using its Surveillance Software, and that the company has also scraped data from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram to sell and license for profit.
In the complaint, which was obtained by Gizmodo, Meta has asked a judge to permanently ban Voyager from Facebook and Instagram. “As a direct result of Defendant’s unlawful actions, Meta has suffered and continues to suffer irreparable harm for which there is no adequate remedy at law, and which will continue unless Defendant’s actions are enjoined,” the filing reads. Meta said Voyager’s actions have caused it “to incur damages, including investigative costs, in an amount to be proven at trial.”
Meta claims that Voyager scraped data from accounts belonging to “employees of non-profit organizations, universities, news media organizations, healthcare facilities, the armed forces of the United States, and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as full-time parents, retirees, and union members.” The company noted in a blog post it disabled accounts linked to Voyager and that filed the suit to enforce its terms and policies.
“Companies like Voyager are part of an industry that provides scraping services to anyone regardless of the users they target and for what purpose, including as a way to profile people for criminal behavior,” Jessica Romero, Meta’s director of platform enforcement and litigation, wrote. “This industry covertly collects information that people share with their community, family and friends, without oversight or accountability, and in a way that may implicate people’s civil rights.”
In 2021, The Guardian reported that the Los Angeles Police Department had tested Voyager’s social media surveillance tools in 2019. The company is said to have told the department that police could use the software to track the accounts of a suspect’s friends on social media, and that the system could predict crimes before they took place by making assumptions about a person’s activity.
According to The Guardian, Voyager has suggested factors like Instagram usernames denoting Arab pride or tweeting about Islam could indicate someone is leaning toward extremism. Other companies, such as Palantir, have worked on predictive policing tech. Critics such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation claim that tech can’t predict crime and that algorithms merely perpetuate existing biases.
Data scraping is an issue that Meta has to take seriously. In 2021, it sued an individual for allegedly scraping data on more than 178 million users. Last November, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined the company €265 million ($277 million) for failing to stop bad actors from obtaining millions of people’s phone numbers and other data, which were published elsewhere online. The regulator said Meta failed to comply with GDPR data protection rules.
Zellar secures £600,000 investment deal from The Co-operative Bank
Zellar, the sustainability score for every business, has received a £600,000 investment from The Co-operative Bank. The deal follows the…
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