Mozilla Firefox Will Help You Detect Fake Product Reviews

Fakespot has been a popular service for years, allowing you to check (roughly) how many reviews for a given product online are legitimate. Mozilla has now acquired Fakespot, and will integrate its technology into Firefox.

Mozilla announced today that it has taken on development of Fakespot, with creator Saoud Khalifah staying on the project to oversee its expansion. The company said in a blog post, “Fakespot doesn’t do this by having an army of its own reviewers reviewing the reviews. It uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) system to detect patterns and similarities between reviews in order to flag those that are most likely to be deceptive. Using Fakespot, a buyer is able to quickly see where deceptive reviews may be artificially inflating a product’s ranking in search engines. As Mozilla continues to expand our work around ethical AI and responsible advertising, Fakespot is a natural fit.”

Fakespot will continue to be available as browser extensions and a standalone website, but Mozilla is also planning to integrate it into the Firefox web browser. There aren’t many details about how that will work yet, but presumably, Firefox will display Fakespot’s ratings somewhere when you navigate to a store listing. The integration will roll out “over time,” with no promised release date. Right now, Fakespot works on stores like Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Sephora, Shopify, and Walmart.

The new integration sounds potentially more useful than some other recent changes to Firefox — there are still a lot of people not interested in the browser’s Pocket integration — but hopefully it doesn’t turn into annoying bloat. That has become an increasing problem with Edge, Opera, and other browsers.

Source: Mozilla