Unvarnished People Review Site Faces Controversy

San Francisco (GaeaTimes.com) Unvarnished is a people review site that lets anyone create a profile for a person and review and comment about the person. Yes, you heard it right; it is a people review site in comparison to what sites like Yelp provides for rating or review of Restaurants or local business.

As you’ve guessed it, there is a good possibility that the site can be and most probably will be used to defame anyone whom you don’t like. Cyber-bullying is already causing headaches in the social networking sites such as Facebook and the launch of this new uber version of cyber bullying website may turn the situation from bad to worse.

In the website, if you find any profile of yours, you can claim the profile but you won’t be able to edit or delete the reviews on you. Unvarnished thinks that if users could modify the comments on them by others, the usefulness of the site would be reduced.

LA Times quoted the lawyers saying,

Absolutely it is litigation nightmare. The essential question is, ‘Who can I sue?’ Obviously, all the principles of defamation apply to things posted anywhere, including the Web. Having to answer for the statements that we make in public has been a pretty good deterrent to making comments that cannot be substantiated. That’s not a bad thing. But if the object of ‘praise’ cannot hold the person accountable in defamation law because they can’t find them, then the field is wide open to do and say things that we would not otherwise say and get enormous coverage for the comments. Unvarnished assumed that there is truth under the varnish, but there is no check for that. This is taking ‘customer reviews’ like we see on lots of sites and personalizing it. I guess people do this sort of stuff ‘in private,’ but posting it on the Web is the opposite of private.