The advantage of map platforms Today is that at a glance we can have a lot of information. On the one hand, the different views of the map: satellite, hybrid or standard. On the other hand, we can see the profiles, opinions and additional information about the companies that are located in the place we are visiting, saving us time to do another search on the Internet.
The problem lies when the profiles of those companies that we consult are flash and created to deceive and swindle. Google has confirmed that it deleted 3 million fake business profiles from Google Maps in 2018, of which 85% had no contact with any user. This aspect is of vital importance for map services, because many users were engaged in scams.
Fake companies and Google Maps performances
In an extensive release press Google has explained everything related to this topic, highlighting above all what is the action of Google when they detect a fake profile. In addition, they have ensured that the controls are increasingly stricter and there are fewer potentially misleading profiles, which means greater security and trust on the part of users.
Google Maps helps people explore, navigate, do their homework, and more and more people are using Google Maps to find local businesses. Over the years, we have added more than 200 million places to Google Maps and each month we connect people with businesses more than nine billion times, including more than one billion phone calls and three billion requests. addresses.
The information provided by the company profiles is essential to find the places that users travel every day. We can consult the schedule, telephone numbers, address, menus or letters and, of course, observe the criticisms that other users have made of the place to go or, if on the contrary they are bad, change places. These are the GoogleMyBusiness.
The existence of fake profiles on Google Maps has affected thousands of people in the last year, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Users who had contacted companies thanks to the map service and were charged double the amount stipulated, etc. The main objective is collect data and then sell them online. This, although it may seem new to us, is a business that has been online for dozens of years, but on other platforms.
Although fake business profiles make up a small percentage of overall business profiles on Google, local business scammers have been a thorn in the internet's side for more than a decade. They even existed when business listings were printed, bound, and delivered to your doorstep.
Google provides us in its press release some interesting data on the subject we are talking about:
- We eliminate more than 3 million fake business profiles, and more than 90 percent of those business profiles were deleted before a user could view the profile.
- Our internal systems were responsible for more than 85 percent of these deletions.
- Users told us about more than 250,000 of the fake business profiles that we removed.
- We disabled more than 150,000 user accounts that were deemed abusive, a 50 percent increase from 2017.
We will see if Apple takes note of these events and are avoidable, above all, in its new big update for iOS 13 with Apple Maps and Look Around.
