What do your neighborhood Thai restaurant and the TSA have in common? Well, you know you can Yelp them. But now that the federal government has said it is actively asking for feedback, Carly Fiorina s happy to oblige.
Fiorina doesn t complain about getting patted down by the TSA, but what do you know — she gives the Transportation Security Agency just one star in a review in which she takes the opportunity to slam other parts of the government as well. Because as you might guess, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO turned presidential candidate has ideas about how to make it better.
The TSA spent $160 million of your taxpayer dollars on body scanners that have a 96% failure rate, her Aug. 18 review — a screenshot of which was posted on her Facebook page — says. Unfortunately, these stories of inept federal bureaucracies have become far too common.
Yelp announced Tuesday that it has teamed up with the federal government, whose agencies will claim their Yelp pages, read and respond to reviews, and incorporate that feedback into service improvements. The agencies involved include Social Security Administration offices, national parks and other places that already have a presence on the review site. (DigitalGov, which is run by the General Services Administration, actually announced the Yelp tie-up earlier this month.)
Yelp noted that some lawmakers had called for a Yelp for government earlier this year, and that its platform is filling a need to keep government transparent and accountable.
So rant and rave away — now you know the government is actually listening. (And we re not talking in the Big Brother kind of way. For the purposes of this post.)
Photo at top: Carly Fiorina, Republican presidential candidate and former HP CEO. (AFP/Getty Images archives)