Content Removal and Legal Requests

Report the review

Every published review has a Report link under it. That link puts the review in front of the same moderator who read it in the first place, with your reason and your email attached. An email to legal@trucker-route.com ends up in the same queue, because we log it as a report by hand, which is a day slower and no more effective.

What makes a report easy to act on is detail. "This review is false" is not something anyone can check. "The review says we do not pay detention. Detention is on page 4 of the driver handbook and it is on the settlements for that week, both attached" is. Point at the sentence, say what is wrong with it, and say what you have.

You do not need a lawyer to file a report and a letter from one does not move it up the queue.

What we remove

Two grounds, and there is not a third.

• The review breaks our published rules. The grounds are the seven in the Review Guidelines, taken from the FTC rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, 16 CFR 465.7. They are the same seven a reporter picks from, and we apply them the same way to a positive review as to a negative one.
• A court has ordered it, and the order found specific statements false. Send us the order. An order that identifies which statements a court found defamatory is one we act on. A complaint you have filed is not an order, and a default judgment against a person who never appeared gets read carefully before we do anything.

We do not edit review text. Not to cut one sentence, not under a court order, not because you asked politely. If a review cannot stay as written, the whole review comes down and the author is told why. A moderator who rewrites a driver's account has made it our writing, and it is also a review the driver never wrote.

Removal is recorded: what was removed, who removed it, when, and on what ground.

What we do not remove

We do not take a review down because it is negative. Not because it cost you an applicant, not because it is the top result for your company name, and not because a letter arrived on a firm's letterhead.

16 CFR 465.7 makes it unlawful for a business to use an unfounded legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation or a public false accusation to suppress a review. That is the FTC's rule and it binds the sender, not the platform. We keep the correspondence. A demand that arrives with a threat attached gets the same reading on the merits as one that does not, and nothing more.

We are also not the author. Under 47 U.S.C. 230 we provide an interactive computer service, and we are not the publisher or the speaker of what a driver posts on it. A claim that a review is defamatory is a claim against the person who wrote it. We will not stand in for them, and we will not hand you their name because you asked.

Nobody buys a removal. We do not take money to hide, reorder or delete a review, and we do not take money to publish one either. Buying and selling reviews is prohibited by 16 CFR 465.4 and it is prohibited here in both directions.

One narrow exception to all of that. Where a claim identifies specific statements and a court is already involved, we may hide a review while we read the papers. Hiding is reversible, it is logged, it takes a minute, and it is a pause rather than a decision in anyone's favor.

Who wrote it

Reviews publish under "Driver" or "Verified driver". The author's name and email address are visible to site administrators and to nobody else, and every time an administrator opens them it is written to a log with the name of the administrator and the time.

We disclose an author's identity only on a valid subpoena or a court order. Not on a demand letter, not on a promise that you only want to talk to them, not on an offer to settle. Send legal process to legal@trucker-route.com. We read each one with counsel, we produce only what the process actually requires, and we tell the author first whenever the law and the order allow it, so they have the chance to respond.

What exists to be produced, and how long it is kept, is described in the Privacy Policy. IP addresses are held for 90 days and then nulled, which is a real limit rather than a stance: after that window there is nothing to produce.

What happens after you write to us

1. Your report or letter is logged against the review the day it arrives.
2. A moderator reads the review against the guidelines, with what you sent alongside it.
3. If it breaks a rule, the review is removed and the author is told which rule and why.
4. If it does not, we tell you that we removed nothing, and why, with a link to this page.

You get an answer within five business days. An answer that says no is still an answer, and you will get the reasoning rather than a form letter.

Your FMCSA data, and replying to a review

The registration, authority, fleet, inspection and crash figures on a company page come from FMCSA, through data.transportation.gov and QCMobile. We do not edit them and we cannot correct them. If a number there is wrong, the place to fix it is DataQs, and the correction reaches us on the next sync. Trucker Route is not affiliated with the US DOT and a company page is not an official FMCSA record.

A public reply to a review, attached to the review itself, is not built yet. When it is, it will require verifying that you speak for the company by a call to the phone number in your FMCSA record. Until then the Report link and this page are the two routes we have, and neither of them lets anyone post in your name.

Copyright: notice and takedown

If material stored on this site at the direction of a user infringes a copyright you own, tell us and we will act on it. In practice that means a document a driver uploaded or an image, rather than a review, since the words in a review belong to the driver who wrote them.

What a notice has to contain

A notice under 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3) has six parts. A notice missing one of them is not a notice under the statute, and we will write back and say which part is missing rather than ignore it.

1. Your physical or electronic signature, as the owner of the exclusive right or a person authorized to act for them.
2. The copyrighted work you say has been infringed. If one notice covers several works, list them.
3. The material you say is infringing, with enough detail for us to find it. The URL of the page and a description of the item on it is the shortest way.
4. Your address, telephone number and email address.
5. A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
6. A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the right.

Under 17 U.S.C. 512(f), a person who knowingly misrepresents that material is infringing is liable for the damages that misrepresentation causes, including legal costs. Read what you are signing.

Designated agent

Counter notice

If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you can send a counter notice under 17 U.S.C. 512(g)(3). It has to contain:

1. Your physical or electronic signature.
2. The material that was removed and the location where it appeared before it was removed.
3. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith belief the material was removed as a result of a mistake or a misidentification.
4. Your name, address and telephone number, a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the district in which your address is located, or, if your address is outside the United States, of any judicial district in which we may be found, and a statement that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the notice.

We send a counter notice on to the person who filed the original notice. If they do not tell us within 10 business days that they have filed a court action to keep the material down, we may restore it between 10 and 14 business days after we receive the counter notice.

Repeat infringers

We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers, which 17 U.S.C. 512(i) requires of any site that wants the safe harbor. Notices we act on are recorded against the account that uploaded the material. An account terminated for this cannot be replaced by signing up again with the same Google account.

Contact

Removal requests, subpoenas, court orders, DMCA notices and counter notices, and anything else legal: legal@trucker-route.com. We answer within five business days.

The rules a review is judged against are the Review Guidelines. What we collect and how long we keep it is in the Privacy Policy. The agreement covering all of it is the Terms.