Tag Archive: online liability

Plenty of Fish in the Sea, But Please Don’t Fugu Me

Homer Simpson - Fugu Me!

California Attorney General Kamala Harris recently announced an agreement with three of the largest online dating sites:  eHarmony, Match.com and Spark Networks (parent company of JDate and ChristianMingle, among others).  In much the same way Facebook reached an agreement regarding child safety with AG’s nationwide in 2008, it appears the dating sites agreed to some voluntary…

“AirB&E” and Crisis Management for Consumer Web Startups

Mashable screen shot - Airbnb on Ransackgate: "We Screwed Up And We're Sorry"

Much has been written about the cooperative nature of Valley culture, and Airbnb itself was an outgrowth of the idealistic “couch surfing” movement. As with any online community, well-meaning early adopters arrive first, and if all goes well, a culture of respect evolves that keeps behavior within relatively civilized boundaries. The trouble comes when a site becomes wildly successful, going from 1,000 closed beta members to 1,000,000 users. As it grows, any service will come to resemble a diverse cross-section of the general population, with the full range of human misconduct represented.

If You Build It, They Will Abuse It

MySpace Traffic Growth - Hitwise

As a completely made-up statistic, assume that 0.01% of users are sociopaths or predators who cause serious damage to the community and its other members. With 10,000 users, that’s one guy. With a million, it’s a hundred people. With 100 million registered users — the scale at MySpace when I left — it’s ten thousand. That kind of math illustrates why every major consumer Internet company has an abuse team that serves as the first line of defense against all kinds of ugliness.

Martindale-Hubbell Connects Lawyers, and… More Lawyers

Martindale-Hubbell is a legendary name in legal circles, synonymous with legal directories dating back more than 140 years.  Long before the Internet existed, a ritual among junior associates at law firms was to pull the weighty leatherbound tome off the shelf, find opposing counsel’s M-H profile and hand out copies to everyone on the deal…