New Delhi: As fraudsters try to update business information on Google Business Profiles with abusive edits, the tech giant has said that it blocked more than 100 million of these edits from going live on Google Maps last year, using machine learning-based models.
The company identified and removed more than 7 million fake Business Profiles — more than 630,000 of which were reported directly to the company by users.
“We stopped more than 12 million attempts from bad actors to create fake Business Profiles and nearly 8 million attempts from bad actors to claim Business Profiles that didn’t belong to them,” said Pavithra Kanakarajan, Group Product Manager, User Generated Content.
Every day, Google receives around 20 million contributions from people using Maps – from updated business hours and phone numbers to photos and reviews.
“As with any platform that accepts contributed content, we have to stay vigilant in our efforts to fight abuse and make sure this information is accurate,” Kanakarajan said in a statement.
Google teams disabled more than 1 million user accounts due to policy-violating activity, such as online vandalism or fraud, in 2021.
To prevent violative content from appearing on Google Business Profiles, the company put protections on over 100,000 businesses after detecting suspicious activity and abuse attempts.
“We blocked or removed more than 95 million policy-violating reviews, over 60,000 of which were taken down due to Covid-related instances. We took down more than 1 million reviews that were reported directly to us,” said Google.
Google technologies and teams blocked or removed more than 190 million photos and 5 million videos on Maps that were blurry, low quality, or violated its content policies.
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