Google Maps is one of the most popular app from the house of Google. Millions of people use it for navigation and with so many users, there are chances that there might be a few bad actors as well. Google, in a blog post, has detailed how it weeds out irrelevant and offensive information.
In the blog post, Google said that sometimes fraudsters try to update business information on Google Business Profiles with abusive edits. “In 2021, we blocked more than 100 million of these edits from going live thanks to our continued advancements in machine learning models that improved our ability to catch bot activity and unearth suspicious activity patterns,” wrote Pavithra Kanakarajan, Group Product Manager, User Generated Content, Google.
Kanakrajan further write that due to the improvements in Google’s machine learning technologies, it identified and removed more than 7 million fake Business Profiles from Google Maps. Further, Google 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. Apart from this Google disable more than 1 million user accounts due to policy-violating activity, such as online vandalism or fraud.

Fake reviews, blurry photos were removed

There are many individuals and groups attempt to use fake reviews as a tactic to hurt local businesses — oftentimes spurred by public attention on differences in opinions — through Google Maps. In 2021, to prevent violative content from appearing on Google Business Profiles, Google put protections on over 100,000 businesses after detecting suspicious activity and abuse attempts.
Google also blocked or removed more than 95 million policy-violating reviews, over 60,000 of which were taken down due to COVID-related instances.Also, Google blocked or removed more than 190 million photos and 5 million videos that were blurry, low quality, or violated its content policies.