Vulnerability of Tech Processes and Human Decisions
Here are two interesting incidents I came across online in the last week. One, about a seemingly harmless vulnerability in an online service’s process. The other, a possible vulnerability in human decisions in a human-dependent, traditional business.
First of, a French literary buff, conducted an interesting experiment. It was to check his hypothesis, that the standards of publishing have fallen significantly. Writer Serge Volle, took 50 pages of one of the novels of a Nobel laureate Claude Simon, and sent it to 19 French publishers as his original work. Interestingly, 12 of the publishers flatly rejected it. The others never replied.
While one could argue that publishers might have felt the content or style of this 1962 works, was not relevant for modern readers. However, one could also say that if these people can’t identify quality, how right are we to trust them with deciding if your works are good enough for readers or not.
You can read about the incident here: link
The other incident is even more amusing. An industry colleague of mine in the Design Thinking space shared this one on a group. A writer with an unusual name, Oobah (Butler), once upon a time, used to take small fees from local restaurants to write fake, glorifying reviews about them on TripAdvisor, even if he had never eaten at those restaurants.
And this seemingly huge chink in the TripAdvisor process, got him thinking if he could better himself. And he did. He decided to list his messy shed as a restaurant on TripAdvisor, and then made it London’s top-rated restaurant, without having served a single dish. How bloody cool is that?!
TripAdvisor folks later justified, saying their effort is largely channeled around eliminating fake reviews. Nobody in their right sense would create, or benefit from creating a restaurant that doesn’t exist. But it still is a gaping hole in the process.
Point being, as we continue to be wowed by the latest of apps that simplify our lives dramatically, teams at those companies need to be constantly aware of how their simple-to-use service can be abused.
You can read about the hilarious ‘Taking TripAdvisor on a Trip’ article here: link
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