On the wild, anonymous Internet, you just can’t always trust a glowing review… but at least the iTunes App Store has gotten a little more trustworthy, after the Federal Trade Commission slapped down a California marketing company that was employing people to write positive App Store reviews without full disclosure.
In a statement on Thursday, the FTC said that they had reached an agreement with Reverb to remove the offending reviews from iTunes, as well as barring them from doing any more fraudulent reviews in the future and forcing them to to fully disclose their relationship with their clients, which includes Digital Leisure, Harmonix and MTV Games. A monetary fine was not disclosed.
On Reverb’s part, they seem pretty petulant and unrepentant about the whole thing, casting themselves as the victims.
“It became apparent that we would never agree on the facts of the situation,” she said. “Rather than continuing to spend time and money arguing, and laying off employees to fight what we believed was a frivolous matter, we settled this case and ended the discussion.”
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
