Say what? Yelp is pulling credit histories of people who join the site? If they are, that is way out of bounds for what users typically expect when joining an online review site. As a simple reviewer, I'm not engaging in any business with them, they're not offering me credit, and pulling a credit report on some anonymous internet user would not only be expensive but would require some serious disclosure (as having credit reports pulled actually impacts one's credit score). Not only that, but if they are doing it, it doesn't seem to be working very well.

Besides, I never supplied sufficient information for Yelp to connect me to my credit report without doing some seriously ethically questionable data mining.

Why do you believe that Yelp does this? If so, that would be more surprising to most users than the pay-for-play behavior we're seeing here.

Did you read the article before commenting? The article proposes that Yelp should provide people the option to use their credit rating to prove they are not a sockpuppet in return for Yelp displaying their review. It is only an option, credit ratings are only used because they are a pre-existing identification and authentication source and most importantly YELP IS NOT DOING THIS YET.

As a matter of fact I did, and you're right: I mis-read the parent comment as present tense vs. potential future tense. My apologies.

That said, I think some of the problems with the credit report solution still stand; namely that pulling credit histories has a cost (both to the reviewer and to Yelp). I would worry about what they would do with that information beyond merely authenticating me as a "real person" and I would expect that fewer people would be willing to review a local donut shop if doing so required a credit pull.