Firefox Is Testing a New Feature to Weed Out Fake Customer Reviews

According to a recent story by MSPowerUser, Mozilla Firefox has recently been testing an experimental feature called Review Checker. This feature is powered by Fakespot, which Firefox acquired earlier this year.

Fakespot is an online service that helps weed out fake reviews, products, and sellers. By integrating this service in its browser, Mozilla’s Review Checker will hopefully filter out misleading reviews and counterfeit products. The report suggests that the new feature will initially work on Amazon, BestBuy, and Walmart. The company has just begun testing it out, and it will reportedly roll out to everyone in November. Additionally, Fakespot will offer extensions for browsers such as Chrome and Safari as well as for iOS and Android. At the time of the acquisition, the company announced that Fakespot would work “across all major web browsers and mobile devices.”

Review Checker works by checking the authenticity of a product review, identifying the ones that do not sound real, and assigning a grade based on its analysis. According to Mozilla, 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”. The grades range from A to F, where A and B would mean the review is reliable, C would be a mix of reliable and unreliable, and D and F would be unreliable.

All you have to do to check the reliability of a review is visit a product page on one of the sites listed above, look for the new price tag icon on the top of the page, and click on “Yes, try it” to enable the review checker. You’d then be able to see the generated grade and make an informed decision based on that.

You can also turn the feature off. Just head to the settings section at the bottom of the review checker, and select “Turn off review checker”.

The new feature is said to be quite serious about your privacy. It uses OHTTP or Oblivious HTTP, which makes sure Mozilla doesn’t associate you or your device(s) with the products you have previously looked up. Also, it is apparently lightweight and won’t affect your browsing speed or browser performance.