CyLab Seminar: Mark Seiden

October 16, 2023

12:00 p.m. ET

Zoom or Panther Hollow 4105 (4th Floor of the CIC)

Mark Seiden

*Please note this CyLab seminar is open only to partners and Carnegie Mellon University faculty, students and staff.

Speaker: Mark Seiden
Former Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley

Title: 'How much trust can we put in ratings and reviews on the Internet? Based on a not very scientific study, not much'

Abstract:
Anecdotes are not evidence, but they can suggest some of the problems, including:
  • Sites that don’t (often can’t, due to business limitations) know their customers or even (as intermediaries) their suppliers 
  • Sites with corrupt, defective, lightweight or gameable rating and review systems
  • Sites which are seem to be just crowdsourced beauty contests
  • “Advertorial” sites (that exist just to be in search engines to get clicks and be in the middle of purchasing transactions)
  • Businesses that manufacture both positive and negative reviews and clicks
Two stories worth retelling:
  • The saga of The Shed at Dulwich, a hoax restaurant in journalist Oobah Butler’s garden shed, manipulated into becoming the top rated London restaurant on Tripadvisor.
  • The 2008 Wine Spectator "Award of Excellence'' given to a nonexistent  Milan restaurant "Osteria L'Intrepido'' (a fabrication by wine journalist Robin Goldstein just to apply for that award.)
What parameters of reputation could be a better basis for establishing actual trust in a review of an online business or social site?  Lots of examples and some hints to develop your crap detector to better spot manipulated reviews.  (Also spotting phony LinkedIn connection requests, one current plague of routine exploitation of professional communities by scammers.)
 
Bio:

Mark Seiden (mis@seiden.com), a programmer since the '60s, has worked with diverse companies and research organizations in software engineering, then in network, OS, and physical security. (He's also had parallel careers in words and music).

Currently: Security Advisor to the Internet Archive, Associate in Computer Science at Columbia University, DARPA-funded research project with UC Santa Cruz, has been an expert in >50 criminal and civil cases figuring out whodunit and whatdeydun.

Significant prior institutional affiliations: IBM Research, Lucasfilm, Yahoo, Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, Bellcore, IRCAM. 15 years on the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (concerned with names and numbers on the Internet), participant in multiple National Academy of Sciences studies of technological risk.