[tor-talk] Yelp blocking Tor users from viewing entire site

[Yuri]

On 01/21/2015 05:04, Aymeric Vitte wrote:
> If they cannot detect a crawler using Tor, then they cannot detect any 
> other crawler, like a crawler switching IPs as mentionned in another 
> post, using vpns or proxies, etc
>
> So in that case it's useless to block Tor, because Tor network's size 
> is not really significant compared to other means that crawlers have, 
> probably they just choosed the easy way as well as crawlers might have 
> chosen the easy way too (use Tor), blocking Tor so they have solved 
> one problem.
>
> But in fact they have solved nothing if they are not protected against 
> crawlers, and if they are protected the protection would be something 
> like blocking the IP or sending a captcha. 

One other thing they try to protect from is people writing reviews for 
their own businesses. If someone logs into Yelp as the business owner 
and as a reviewer from the same IP, they would make such review "not 
recommended" (previously they made it "hidden" and protected with 
captcha). And possibly flag the whole business as suspect for writing 
false reviews. Yelp also sends businesses monthly reports on how many 
people viewed their Yelp listings and from which geographic areas. Tor 
defeats such detection schemes, therefore they decided to block it to 
simplify their guessing and reporting work.

Yuri