RottenNeighbor.com is such a site. Launched just over a year ago in the USA by Brant Walker, it sees itself as the world’s first search engine that allows users to judge their neighbors and rate them – positively or negatively. Using this site, visitors could inform themselves about the potential new neighborhood before buying a property, or to warn other users about bad neighbors.

In reality, most users actually use the site to take revenge on hated people – to discriminate, denounce or slander – whether neighbor, colleague, ex-partner or rival. In this way this online-pillory affects both private citizens as well as business people.  In so doing, RottenNeighbor.com uses cartographic material provided by Google Maps.  After entering an address in the search field, the location is question appears in Map View. Addresses/locations of already-rated people appear as house icons– red for bad neighbor, green for good neighbor. A click on the icon opens a window usually revealing a tasteless entry from an unidentifiable user dishing the inhabitant(s) of the marked house.

Apart from the fact that by identifying the exact location, the name of the occupant can be discovered, few users are deterred from fully naming the ‘guilty’ party, while the user remains anonymous. Photos and videos of the denounced person can also be uploaded.  None of this is edited by the site’s administrators, leaving unvetted content on the web.

As of a couple of months, RottenNeighbor.com has been enjoying steadily growing interest also in Germany.  The access numbers have grown so much in recent weeks that the server experienced overloads at the beginning of September, and the German portal was inaccessible for several days. As with the growing hits, so did the number of comments delivered by German citizens.  Since then, there is hardly a German town on the virtual map, where one can not find some green houses and many red ones with predominantly insulting remarks.

Whomever is defamed on this website – and this can affect anyone – can basically not defend him or herself. Even when one chose to sue for defamation of character or libel, and claim damages or compensation, it is extremely difficult to discover the person who posted the defamation. Firstly, the accusations are delivered anonymously, and secondly, the portal’s administrators are located in the USA, where other data protection guidelines and views on freedom of expression take effect. One can indeed have a rating removed, but this takes time and doesn’t protect against new insults.

While other ratings platforms concentrate on objective criticism on offers, products, services or activities connected to the function of the person being rated, RottenNeighbor.com concentrates above all on private persons.  This leads to the public airing of feuds and revenge-lust.  The use of such a platform is even more questionable, as the accuracy of the comments is almost impossible to ascertain. The personal damage that can be inflicted by the platform is therefore immeasurably large.

Online-pillory or valuable information platform – what do you think of RottenNeighbor.com?