An employee of Woowa Brothers walks into the comopany's headquarters in Songpa District, Seoul, in this undated file photo. Yonhap

By Kim Jae-heun

Woowa Brothers, operator of the country's largest food delivery platform Baedal Minjok (Baemin), has adopted a new review management policy based on the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) newly enacted international covenant on online consumer reviews (ISO20488), according to company officials Friday. The move is designed to protect restaurant operators, as more and more consumers leave malicious or irrelevant comments about food or restaurant service.

Woowa Brothers CEO Lee Kuk-hwan

It is the first time for a local platform to establish a review policy based on a global standard convention.

The delivery platform operator conducted related research with Konkuk University's Digital Communication Research Center and set the three main values of its new review policy as "trust," "protection of rights and interests" and "openness."

The company also included authenticity, accuracy, personal information protection, security, transparency and accessibility in detailed values, which are the basic principles of online review services presented in international protocols.

Specifically, the principles of writing reviews for platform users say "not to leave comments that differ from the fact for economic benefits" and to "pay attention to the accuracy so as not to provide false or misleading information."

In addition, Woowa Brothers noted that their users have to write reviews based on their real experience with its services and may not expose their own or another's personal information. Using hateful, antisocial or unethical expressions is not allowed as well.

Apart from the establishment of a new review policy, the company has been coming up with various countermeasures to fight customers' false and malicious comments.

Woowa Brothers started its "review statistics" service in November, in which the company calculates the average of the stars given by a customer so that others can take into account the customer's evaluation tendencies.

It also separated consumers' reviews of delivery service and restaurants to increase the accuracy of the information.

"With the company's new review policy management, we hope to protection our customers' right to access accurate and correct information on our service and restaurants' food," a Woowa Brothers official said.