Abuse Prevention

Current events and filters

That was a longer than intended hiatus from blogging. I’ll be honest, though, talking about email just seemed so trivial in the face of what was and is continuing to happen. I posted this over on slack, earlier, and Steve pointed out I should make it public on the blog. It’s as good a way as any to come back to the blog.

Online communities and abuse

A few weekends ago we met a friend for coffee in Palo Alto. As the discussion wandered we ended up talking about some of the projects we’re involved in. Friend mentioned she was working with a group building a platform for community building. We started talking about how hard it is these days to run online groups and communities. One of the things I started discussing was what needed to be built into communities like this to prevent abuse and damage.

Peeple, Security and why hiding reviews doesn't matter

There’s been a lot of discussion about the Peeple app, which lets random individuals provide reviews of other people. The founders of the company seem to believe that no one is ever mean on the Internet and that all reviews are accurate. They’ve tried to assure us that no negative reviews will be published for unregistered users. They’re almost charming in their naivety, and it might be funny if this wasn’t so serious.
The app is an invitation to online abuse and harassment. And based on the public comments I’ve seen from the founders they have no idea what kind of pain their app is going to cause. They just don’t seem to have any idea of the amount of abuse that happens on the Internet. We work with and provide tools to abuse and security desks. The amount of stuff that happens as just background online is pretty bad. Even worse are the attacks that end up driving people, usually women, into hiding.
The Peeple solution to negative reviews is two fold.

Return Path announces new abuse prevention service

Return Path announced a new product this morning, designed to help mailbox providers stop outbound abuse.