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The right to be forgotten is essential in a society. Businesses have the right to fail sometimes and improve. If a business has completely changed its processes over the course of a year, shouldn’t past reviews be removed? Even for readers, recent reviews are more trustworthy than old ones (cf. “All reviews don’t count the same”).
Google allows businesses to manage their profiles and update information but discourages the creation of duplicate listings. If a business has undergone significant changes, such as a change in ownership, it might request the removal of old reviews that are no longer relevant. However, this process involves providing evidence and may not always result in the removal of negative reviews.
To work around this issue, companies, especially small businesses, often remove their listing and create a new one if their average rating falls too low. However, they should be able to address this without starting back from scratch. Additionally, this practice is unfair to reviewers who shared their genuine experiences and to readers who lose access to potentially valuable information.
- Decreased weight for older reviews. The older a review, the less weight it should carry in the average rating. This concept, discussed in “All reviews don’t count the same,” is implemented by Trustpilot in their TrustScore calculation, although the exact weighting is unknown.
- “Marked as fixed” feature. Readers could benefit from seeing if an issue mentioned in a review has been addressed. This could potentially decrease the weight of the review (even to zero) in the overall average. However, several questions arise:
- How many times should an issue be marked as fixed to ensure its irrelevance?
- How can we prevent companies from abusing this feature by asking connections to mark all bad reviews as fixed, similar to the current abuse of flagging reviews?
- What about reviews mentioning multiple issues, where some have been fixed and others have not (a problem explored in “Categorization”)?