The dangers of outsourcing
An interesting story has been circulating in the past couple of days which highlights some of the potential pitfalls in badly considered outsourcing. It involves an employee at Belkin, a well known brand for home networking routers, and Amazons Mechanical Turk.
Amazons Mechanical Turk brands itself as Artificial Artificial Intelligence. The basic premise is that many tasks that you like would automate are too complex to program a computer to do but very simple for humans. Mechanical Turk aims to solve this by letting users post task for a fixed or piece rate. This market place is potentially a rapidally adapting a scaleable workforce for any business.
It turns out that one of Belkins employees, Michael Bayard, was offering 65 cents to write a good review on for their products on various websites. I’m not sure of the legality of such activity especially as the activity effectively occured worldwide but the damage to the brand could be serious. Various tech blogs quickly caught on to the story and pushed it world wide. Anybody who’s read it, myself included, will probably be wary of any good reviews written about these products and possibly about any of Belkins product range. How can we know what products this was limited to and if they were pesronally writting false reviews before using Mechanical Turk.
Belkin has naturally responded condeming the action taken by Mr Bayard and apologising to its customers. The full apology can be found here.
Update: as I suspected this probably isn’t the first time that Belkin undertook dubious practices to improve their brand online and it isn’t just limited to false reviews on blogs. As just posted on Gizmodo Belkin has apparently been writing false reviews on blogs, Amazon, Paying magazines for good reviews and a variety of other shady practices.
