Fair Rating: German Reviews sɣur Yet Another Expat

Some businesses in Germany abuse German defamation law to mass-remove negative reviews from their Google Maps listings. Google recently started disclosing how many reviews were removed this way for a given business, with a notice like "21 to 50 reviews removed due to defamation complaints" at the top of the Reviews tab. But the visible star rating still reflects only the surviving reviews, so some businesses look significantly better than they actually are.

Fair Rating shows you what that business's rating would look like if the removed reviews had not been removed. It reads Google's own disclosure directly from the page and calculates an adjusted rating, shown as an amber badge right below the removal notice.

HOW IT WORKS

1. Open a Google Maps business page and click the Reviews tab.
2. If Google is showing the defamation-removal notice, Fair Rating inserts an "Adjusted rating" badge below it.
3. The badge shows a star range, for example "~ 4.6 – 4.7 ★ (−0.09 to −0.17)", along with a plain-English explanation of the math.

By default, each removed review is counted as a 1-star vote (the worst case within Google's 1–5 scale). You can change this to 0, 2, or 3 stars in the extension popup, depending on how punitive you want the assumption to be.

For businesses that hit Google's top disclosure bucket ("more than 250 removed"), Fair Rating extrapolates the upper bound proportionally to the total number of reviews, so large businesses cannot hide behind the cap. The badge clearly labels this as an extrapolated estimate rather than a Google-provided number.

SUPPORTED LANGUAGES

Detection is keyword-based and works across Google Maps in roughly 20 languages, including English, German, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Czech, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Japanese and Chinese.

PRIVACY

Fair Rating collects nothing. No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking, no server, no account. It reads the rating data locally from the Google Maps page in your browser, and stores one user preference (your chosen star value) using Chrome's built-in storage API. It runs only on Google Maps and Google Search pages, nowhere else.

The code is open source. Every line is available to inspect at github.com/Ennui92/fair-rating-extension.

CREDITS

The idea was proposed by u/LiamPolygami on r/berlin, in a thread discussing Google's new defamation-removal disclosure. Built by Yet Another Expat, a podcast about life abroad.