Mashup disclaimers - are they worth it?

I have done a fair amount of work for large UK travel companies and one step that is taken for most new projects prior to finalising the scope is a legal review. This tends to cover whether there are any data privacy issues or pricing issues such as compliance with trading standards obligations.

Most of the time it is a “tick in the box” but occasionally it turns up issues that were not considered by the functionality designers (this is especially true if the designers are not experienced in travel ecommerce but come from other sectors)

As a result if you are a small company and you can’t afford the legal fees you have a couple of choices - you can either copy larger companies - or perhaps risk it and wait for any feedback once your project has launched (ecommerce legal fees for functionality reviews can be very expensive - so very few companies can actually afford it)

Mashups are the new kid on the block for website functionality. For example HolidayHypermarket (part of the retail division of First Choice and now part of the 2nd largest travel group in the UK) have got a “mashup” on their website.

On this page you can see that they have a Florida travel guide. Below the normal search engine optimised text are 2 external data sources - Google Maps and Google Videos.

They have a mashup disclaimer which reads:

Disclaimer: Holiday Hypermarket does not endorse any of the videos that appear on this site. All video content is supplied by external sources and is intended as information only. We accept no responsibility for any of the video content contained within these pages.

Which is all well and good - and I am sure put there as a result of any legal review that they may have undertaken.

However, if you put the search term “Disney” into the Florida holiday video search the 2nd result is a video all about how Disney is linked to satanism.

It strikes me that whatever the disclaimer says, this is probably not what Holiday Hypermarket had in mind when they integrated Google Video in to their site.

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