Rethinking Online Culpability : The Amazon “Keep Calm” Shirts Controversy (Part 1 : A/B Testing) : : Future of the #Internet – And how to stop it.
▻http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/futureoftheinternet/2013/05/22/rethinking-online-culpability-the-amazon-keep-calm-shirts-controv
le problème du #spam sur #amazon et la vente de produits qui n’existent pas (qu’on liste et qu’on produira à la demande)
The “Keep Calm” debacle resulted from an automated script that generated words to approximately fit the design’s syntax and layout. The resulting list, says SGB owner Michael Fowler, “was culled from 202k words to around 1100 and ultimately slightly more than 700 were used due to character length and the fact that I wanted to closely reflect the appearance of the original slogan graphically.” Clearly, the vendor is at fault for failing to eliminate possible ending phrases to the Keep Calm slogan like “rape a lot” and “choke her” from a 700-word list. However, similarly automated practices regularly take place on a much larger scale across the internet. Determining accountability for these widespread and fundamental operations can be much less straightforward.
In some ways, Solid Gold Bomb’s generation of the offensive shirts can be seen merely as A/B testing gone awry. (...)
With #A/B_testing, the line between savvy capitalism and unethical business practice can get fairly nebulous. Zynga, for example, relies on a practice that CEO Mark Pincus calls “ghetto testing.” One of Zynga’s approaches to game development is to advertise games that do not yet exist, in order to test consumer response to a basic premise.