{"id":2216,"date":"2018-04-09T16:32:53","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T20:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/?p=2216"},"modified":"2023-01-09T11:29:41","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T16:29:41","slug":"consumer-protector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/consumer-protector\/","title":{"rendered":"Consumer Protector"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back when he was a software engineering student, Saoud Khalifah \u201913, \u201914M liked to buy the things he needed\u2014from clothing and groceries to books and electronics\u2014on the web. But all too often when the products arrived, he found they didn\u2019t match the glowing reviews he\u2019d read. The quality was poor, or the items simply didn\u2019t do what they were supposed to.<\/p>\n<aside>\n<header>Don\u2019t believe the hype<\/header>\n<p class=\"introFacts\">Based on Fakespot\u2019s analysis, these sellers received an F for the authenticity of their reviews.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>\u00bb Pure Body Naturals, which sells beauty products on Amazon, has only 40 percent reliable reviews of its products based on nearly 200,000 reviews.<\/p>\n<p>\u00bb LESHP, which sells more than 400 electronics on Amazon, has 60 percent unreliable reviews based on a total of 10,500.<\/p>\n<p>\u00bb Kangaroo, which sells baby products and pool toys, also had 60 percent unreliable reviews based on more than 17,500 reviews.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>Khalifah soon realized that many of the reviews he was basing his purchasing decisions on weren\u2019t real. Rather, they had been written by someone the seller paid to rave about the product and thus inflate its rating. Back then, there was no easy way to filter out phony reviews from authentic ones. So Khalifah built Fakespot.com, a website that automatically scans reviews to give consumers better insight about the products they want to purchase.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn the future, everything is going to be purchased online,\u201d says Khalifah. \u201cSo the reputation of sellers, and accurate reviews of their products, are critical for making informed purchasing decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t long before Fakespot caught the attention of major media outlets, such as CBS MoneyWatch, CNET, and <em>USA Today<\/em>. Khalifah had taken a job as a software engineer at Goldman Sachs after graduating, but the publicity was soon bringing more than 100,000 visitors per month to the site\u2014more than enough for Khalifah to leave his job to focus on Fakespot full time.<\/p>\n<p>The site is simple to use. Consumers insert a link for a product, and Fakespot analyzes the reviews, assigns them an overall grade (A through F), and provides a summary of what consumers think about the product. To make the site more accurate, Khalifah incorporated natural-language processing. \u201cNLP technology goes beyond searching for certain keywords,\u201d says Khalifah. \u201cIt allows the site to comprehend and understand the textual content of reviews. Then we can use this understanding for the evaluation of authenticity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The site also detects if reviews are skewed negatively without merit. For example, if a product reviewer complains about the shipment (the product arrived late or the packaging was ripped) but not the item, or a restaurant reviewer comments on the d\u00e9cor or wait time but not the food, Fakespot factors that in when determining its grade.<\/p>\n<p>These days, Fakespot draws a half-million visitors per month and has analyzed more than 1.1 billion reviews from Amazon, the Apple App Store, Yelp, and Trip Advisor. The service is free for consumers, but Khalifah has been able to monetize his startup in two ways: selling advertisements on the site and selling product reports through a sister site, Trustwerty. The in-depth analyses can be purchased by sellers who want a better understanding of how consumers view their products or by competitors.<\/p>\n<p>Khalifah is tightlipped about the new project he and his team are working on, though he did say it\u2019s related to making the Internet itself more trustworthy. \u201cReviews are just the start of our ambitions,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tired of getting duped by fake product reviews online? Saoud Khalifah\u2019s website can help you<br \/>\nshop smarter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":2228,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"image_focus":"{\"x\":47,\"y\":35}","hide_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-back"],"thumbnail":"<img width=\"198\" height=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-198x300.jpg\" class=\"lazyload wp-image-2228 wp-post-image\" alt=\"\" role=\"presentation\" style=\"object-position:47% 35%\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-198x300.jpg 198w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-768x1163.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-676x1024.jpg 676w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-1120x1696.jpg 1120w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-560x848.jpg 560w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-280x424.jpg 280w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-320x485.jpg 320w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-640x969.jpg 640w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-2048x3101.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-1536x2326.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-1400x2120.jpg 1400w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-1024x1550.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-828x1254.jpg 828w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-360x545.jpg 360w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah-9x14.jpg 9w, https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2018\/04\/saoudKhalifah.jpg 2262w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px\" \/>","catString":"The Back","issue":"Spring 2018","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2216"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2792,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2216\/revisions\/2792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}