Yelp For People (AKA: We Like Being Sued)

Peeple is going to provide a platform for everyone to share their feelings about others -- even if they don't actually sign up for the service.

Startups! Startups! Startups!

Everyone’s got one these days. I was talking to a VC a couple of months ago and his lament was that everyone he meets in SF these days is a “founder,” even the barista at Starbucks.

Anyway, the latest shiny new thing that has caught people’s attention, and a few million in cash from VCs, is an app called Peeple. Their pitch? Yelp for people.

That’s right, they want to enable you to go around and rate people you know. From the Washington Post:

When the app does launch, probably in late November, you will be able to assign reviews and one- to five-star ratings to everyone you know: your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door…

To review someone, you must be 21 and have an established Facebook account, and you must make reviews under your real name.

You must also affirm that you “know” the person in one of three categories: personal, professional or romantic. To add someone to the database who has not been reviewed before, you must have that person’s cell phone number.

That’s going to go well. Peeple is going to provide a platform for everyone to share their feelings about others — even if they don’t actually sign up for the service.

Peeple makes some noise about protecting people. You have to have an “established” Facebook account — whatever that means. I must get at least one friend request a day from fake accounts on Facebook. Also, getting someone’s cell phone number is hardly a tall order.

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Yet Peeple is sensitive. Peeple is caring.

Positive ratings post immediately; negative ratings are queued in a private inbox for 48 hours in case of disputes. If you haven’t registered for the site, and thus can’t contest those negative ratings, your profile only shows positive reviews.

On top of that, Peeple has outlawed a laundry list of bad behaviors, including profanity, sexism and mention of private health conditions.

“As two empathetic, female entrepreneurs in the tech space, we want to spread love and positivity,” [co-founder Julia] Cordray stressed. “We want to operate with thoughtfulness.”

But what’s not clear is how these reviews are parsed. Is a rating automatically “positive” because it has five stars? What if I rate someone five stars, but in the actual description I go on to qualify that I think they are a five-star piece of shit? That they’re a top notch knucklehead that steals the paper from their neighbor everyday and is a known sexual predator. What now?

On the one hand, if it’s true, that’s a good thing for people to know that someone is a thief and a sexual predator — even if it’s not “love and positivity.” On the other hand, if I’m lying, then I’m defaming someone and Peeple is providing the platform for doing so. Either way, Peeple is laying themselves up to be involved in all the lawsuits. It’s why I’ve repeatedly said that you should lawyer up before you startup.

People already have such a loose understanding of defamation law and feel justified in suing people over imagined slights. Can you imagine what’s going to happen when there is a platform in which everyone has some ranking based on what others have said about them?

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Section 230 should protect Peeple from liability, but they are going to be involved in the discovery process for every single lawsuit around their product. Although, if the same sort of people who are concerned about “love and positivity” get their way, then Section 230 will be removed and we can have a free-for-all on every internet platform which doesn’t police all content that hurts people’s feelings.

But if that’s the case, we are all beholden to the most sensitive, most easily offended among us. Which, apparently is exactly the type of people in charge of Peeple:

If you can’t figure out Facebook comments, maybe you shouldn’t be CEO of a tech company. I’d rank Cordray one out of five stars.

Think she’d let that stay up on Peeple?


Keith Lee practices law at Hamer Law Group, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama. He writes about professional development, the law, the universe, and everything at Associate’s Mind. He is also the author of The Marble and The Sculptor: From Law School To Law Practice (affiliate link), published by the ABA. You can reach him at keith.lee@hamerlawgroup.com or on Twitter at @associatesmind.

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