Amazon has landed in hot waters for allegedly spying on a book reviewer’s Facebook and Twitter profiles and refusing to let her submit a review for an e-book she read because the company thinks she is a friend of the author.
Reviewer Imy Santiago’s initial review was rejected and she tried to uploading it again only be greeted by a message that read, “Sorry. You’re not eligible to review this product. For more information, read the Customer Review Guidelines.”
When Santiago probed Amazon further, they claimed that she knew the author of the book but in reality, all Santiago did was follow that author on social media after reading that author’s first book.
Santiago replied to Amazon as such, claiming she doesn’t know the author personally, although she does follow them on social media. “Knowing an author online, and personally knowing an author in real life are two different things,” reads her appeal.
“By your definition it would mean that bloggers such as myself are being barred from reviewing books they legitimately purchased,” she added.
Unfortunately, Amazon’s next reply was largely unhelpful: “We removed your Customer Reviews because you know the author personally. Due to the proprietary nature of our business, we do not provide detailed information on how we determine that accounts are related.”
Given that this wasn’t really something she publicized, it feels like Amazon might have been spying on her social media activity.
The most obvious conclusion is that Amazon crawls social media services like Facebook and Twitter to establish links between product creators and reviewers to make sure there’s no funny business going on.
Amazon responded to Engadget, stating:[blockquote type=”left”]”We have a long standing policy of not commenting on individual customer accounts or on specific methods of determining review manipulation. However, when we detect that elements of a reviewer’s Amazon account match elements of an author’s Amazon account, we conclude that there is too much risk of review bias that would erode customer trust, and thus we remove the review. I can assure you that we investigate each case.We have built mechanisms, both manual and automated over the years that detect, remove or prevent reviews which violate guidelines. We encourage authors to continue to build their network and community as they normally would. This will not impact customer reviews.”[/blockquote]
We will keep you updated as the story progresses.