Try looking at reviews of sexy stockings and other 'hot' stuff, and you'll see many review photos of girls wearing only those, and usually with links to onlyfans.
Sometimes it happened even with "normal" stuff.. i remember a photo of a naked girl with a stick of ram (reviewed item) as her only "clothing".
Don't embed the tweet, which also prevents Twitter from tracking your users, and just copy-paste the text of the tweet and include a link for those who want to see?
That isn't the only problem. Scams also abound - try searching for a locksmith in your neighborhood. While they've cleaned that up considerably since the last time I checked, I can still find a "locksmith" entry in my area located in a vacant storefront.
I ran into this a few days ago while searching for a TV repair shop near me. At least half the listings on Google Maps were obvious fakes: no street address, no hours, generic website full of stock photos, out-of-region area code, etc.
I eventually found a legitimate shop, but only after using Street View to verify that the shop has a physical storefront, calling up the place, and insisting on bringing my TV to their shop (so I could see for myself the business is real).
The internet is useful, but it's shit like this that makes me hate it. This is the kind of "scalability" that doesn't care if it's amplifying good or bad, so I have to waste time trying to sort through the garbage. (see also: cheap Chinese shit on Amazon)
Update: I went by that way yesterday afternoon, and so I took the opportunity to check it in person, since the Google Street View isn't very good, and it's even crazier: it's an existing Kay Jewelers location in a strip mall.
Yet they have a web site (boy, it's tempting to doxx this). It features a picture of their so-called location, a freestanding building which doesn't even vaguely resemble the strip mall (but it has the right address and phone number on the door). The address is that of the Kay Jewelers store. At that address, there has never been a building resembling what's pictured.
I think I'm going to drop a dime today and let the jewelry shop know its address is being used by a scammer.
Scammers will set up fake businesses everywhere with the phone numbers all routing back to the same boiler room from where they’ll dispatch some low-quality contractor who’ll do a bad job and overcharge you for it.
My parents fell for that, guy completely disassembled to front door and then told them that he needed to fetch a fitting lock and would be back tomorrow. They ended up paying for two round trips to the next city when they specifically asked if the company was local.
This can be considered fraud or false advertising, I'm pretty sure there are existing laws that would cover it.
The problem is that the current legal system wasn't designed to deal with abuse at the scale these platforms provide, and there doesn't seem to be any political pressure to change it.
A simple solution would be to consider the platforms complicit in whatever crime ends up being assisted by them. Someone got duped by a scam ad? The ad platform should be held liable. The market will do the rest, as the platforms will now have an incentive not to be implicated in these problems and will tighten up their rules and compliance processes to make it harder for scammers to operate.
You won't believe how many things Silicon Valley claims "impossible" suddenly become possible when they get hit in their wallet.
I've sold a few things on Craigslist. Every single time some scumbag sends a variant of this message:
"The price seems fair. How about if I send you a money order / cashier's check and then my agent will come and pick it up?"
Yes, Craigslist does warn you about this exact scam. It would not be a hard problem for them to block those scammers. I bet if, as you said, they got hit in the wallet, it would suddenly become a solved problem.
When scams are that endemic, that shows a failure of law enforcement. My PD has hundreds of traffic cops but not even a handful on internet scams and exactly one doing 'to catch a predator' type stings.
Exactly. The police don't choose to pursue it. If they just made an example out of one or two of the scammers, sending them to prison, that would go a long way.
I think you just follow orders as a cop, but then, I've never been one.
I would think that after you've built up a good reputation on the force (which might take years), you could volunteer for financial crimes. But whether that works or not, I have no idea.
My guess is that governments deal with people who try to abuse the law in all sorts of way everywhere. Creating small laws for these things is like playing cat and mouse with millions of mice. If you create a law that is too general to catch many at the same time then you risk hurting legitimate businesses.
If you read about the Craigslist scam I commented on: the police consider financial crimes like this to be their very lowest priority. You can't blame it on judges if the cases never get prosecuted.
Understandable, hiding behind a left-to-right merge where you have to choose between getting hit by the truck that's tailgating you or speeding for a few seconds is far more important police work.
But anyone can see that this is abuse. That's what we have judges for, right? I mean, if a judge is there only to follow the letter of the law we could replace them by a computer.
I did some local SEO work for a glazier a few years ago, their main rival in the map pack (top 3 listings appear on a map in a local Google search) was doing exactly this. Google were exactly 0 help at trying to clean up the obviously fake listings too.
I had similar trying to get quotes for a plumber to fit a boiler in London. After phoning the first person in the Yellow Pages and booking an appointment for them to come and quote, I moved down the list. 8 of the first 10 I called admitted to just being the same company, using different names - they obvs only wanted to book in to quote once! When they came they were lovely but there quote was very low and also low on detail for what they'd do. I found someone local in the end.
Old school spam!
I was wondering why this was so specific to locksmiths as I imagined the same would apply to other trades. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
I guess when it comes to licensed trades the best course of action is to ignore Google or similar unaccountable cesspools and see if that trades' licensing organization provides a list of licensed tradespeople - unlike Google they typically have an incentive to keep it clean and spam-free (unless someone wants to pay to pass the certification multiple times under different names I guess?).
>I was wondering why this was so specific to locksmiths
Because you're locked out of your house, you usually need to get in ASAP, especially if it's late at night. You're in a vulnerable and low-knowledge position (most people aren't familiar with their local locksmiths). Its also not in a position that anyone expects to ever be in. So you call the "closest" place on Google maps.
Essentially if you make a bunch of fake listings all around the State you work in people who are desperate will search for "X near me" and if you have the most dots it will resolve to you. This means more panicked buyers which directly translates to way more money.
Beyond that, the people they send out are low paid and only trained to drill the lock and install a new one (for ~$300+) where if you got a reputable locksmith they would just be able to pick it for much cheaper. The scam companies will quote $25 over the phone ("if we can pick it") and the caller assumes that's the normal condition.
Anyone can add a fake business so that is not surprising... I added a walmart before where I wanted one... and it got built a year or so later. (to tell you the truth, they were voting on it in city council at the time and the anti-walmart crowd didn't like to see it on the map yet)
Spotify is full of 'user generated content' in the form of public playlists. Some people don't bother to set their playlists to private and we get to witness some people's bad taste (or good taste!) in music.
Most people don't even use pseudonyms on Spotify and you can just search for their full legal name and see what music they like. It's an interesting heuristic to look at if you're playing the dating game too; 'Does this person like the same music as me? Let's find out!'
Well, recently there are some changes to Venmo, but on its original form "social media for money"? Like, in other countries that would be a lawsuit (or more likely a government intervention). Apart from Venmo, I haven't heard or used a money-transfer (or equivalent) app that just shows your trail of payments publicly. In some countries, an equivalent system is either operated by a consortium of banks (a la Netherlands' iDEAL or Canada's Interac) or controlled by the central bank.
Google Maps uses contribution from users to the point that something like the current topic happens.
Spotify and Venmo on the other hand (by default) does the opposite: most users expected privacy but, uhm, they tried to be "Facebook, but for x" in an area where everyone (or at least most of their users) wants privacy and you get news reports of what public officials are listening to or spent.
Once I discovered a (for me) new feature in the iOS Google Maps app, showing recently uploaded videos and images for places in my vicinity. I was randomly browsing through it until I found a video of a woman on a car‘s passenger seat trying to pee out of the side window. Wasn’t expecting her to succeed…
Anyhow, reported it and went on, but couldn’t find it later when I wanted to show to friends.
I moved to Apple Maps since the past 6 months or so. At first I thought I would be back to using google maps but I haven’t opened google maps even once. Apple did an amazing job so far with maps. Although once in a while I keep running into a minor bug with traffic updates so far it’s been much better than Google maps
Which part of the world do you live in? I am guessing it’s North America. Here in the UK, Apple maps is fine, but still a good few years behind Google. It’s things like footpaths and cycle lanes which are vastly more detailed on Google Maps, not to mention the actual data in Apple maps being a few years behind (a few of the roads in my area aren’t on Apple maps, and it has no building outlines. The satellite view is about 3 years old.
I find the data on businesses is better on Google maps, too.
And if you have an openstreetmaps nut living near you, it's going to be much more detailed too, one near me updated the location of a rubbish bin within two days of it being moved.
Funnily enough, my experience is the exact opposite. I've been using Apple Maps exclusively during my vacation in the last two weeks and regardless of where I went, the experience was much worse than with Google maps. Restaurant info was not up to date, addresses were wrong and especially the routing was awful. Thanks to apples routing I easily spent a collective 4 hours more on the Autobahn than should have been necessary.
Overall, I will definitely continue to use Google Maps as my main map app. My best guess is that since the iOS market share here in Germany is dramatically different than for example in the US, the quality of the user generated map content is dramatically different as well
This is a little unrelated but it’s a funny anecdote about submitting changes to OpenStreetmaps.
A few years back we build an open source app to handle employee tax deductions and pay for work related driving together with a few other municipalities. Part of how it works relies on a local company to download data from OSM and feed it to us in an address to address routing api, but at one point we changed the driving direction on a rather important (very busy might be the right English?) street to become one-way. OSM got the direction wrong, so that it was suddenly impossible to reach the municipality of our second largest city.
This was “fun” with tens of thousand of employees sending in issues, and I set out to fix it. So with our official municipality account (and not bothering to read the rules) I used Google maps as part of the evidence. I also included a photo I had taken from the street myself. Anyway, because you’re not allowed to reference Google maps I got our account banned and the change reversed so that OSM was wrong again, and it took me 3 days of arguing with the “amateur” contributors to get them to realise that I worked in the organisation who decided which way the direction of the street goes.
This was the cause. OpenStreetMap has a very strict zero-tolerance policy of anything that might be sourced from a copywritten source. Maps were traditionally "big business" before OpenStreetMap, and map data was closely guarded (and the guards had no worries about attacking what they believed to be even the slightest infringements of their copyrights).
> I also included a photo I had taken from the street myself.
If you had used just the photo you took yourself, and not referenced Google at all, you'd have had no issue getting the fix made and having it stick.
I totally get that it was my own fault, hence the “not bothering to read the rules) part, and I also very much regret the language I ended up using in some of the communication at the time.
Looking back on it now it’s sort of hilarious though.
I used to edit OpenStreetMap but one unfortunate experience really soured me to it. I was going through a city, "un-braiding" the dual carriage ways, which was at one point OSM's recommendation for dual carriage intersections (can't find the URL). After fixing up about 15 or so city blocks I got a very angry message from someone who demanded that I undo my edits because this was "his" area of the map. Not wanting to get into a pointless dispute with a nerd, I just reverted the commit and haven't really been into OSM since. Thanks for nothing, I guess. Maybe this was just one guy, or maybe OSM has the same "territorial editors" problem as Wikipedia.
> Maybe this was just one guy, or maybe OSM has the same "territorial editors" problem as Wikipedia.
I hope I speak for everyone involved, but this seems to be the problem of one person. We at OSM aim to be a friendly bunch and hope you come back to edit.
StreetComplete is a great Android app to help update OSM data by asking you questions while you're out walking around. So rather than drawing new features, you're just saying "yes, this is a house/no, there is no wheelchair ramp here/the building number here is 1234" etc.
What impressed me most about StreetComplete was when I needed to add a feature. First time I used the app, no idea how to add some particular thing I saw walking around. So I added a freeform note for that spot, explaining what was there, and added a picture.
Within an hour an experienced OpenStreepmap volunteer had handled the note and added the right map feature.
Around here most bullfight arenas are mislabeled as slaughterhouses (and FWIW the animals are not killed in the arena in Portugal). I once tried to correct it but all the changes got declined. I suspect that besides spam some people like to use Google maps for political statements.
In the scheme of things, maybe changes to places are far more important. If someone messes with the hours of operation of a store, they're directly affecting someone's livelihood. Naked man hiding on the far side of a panorama, not so much.
Who cares about porn spam (ahem) when most of the photos on Google Maps are uploaded by clueless people? Google Maps made it too easy for people to tap “ok” and take every photo they took nearby and upload them in one swoop. Selfies, dogs, sunset photos. Sir this is a Wendy’s.
At first I wonder how could people be so ridiculous by uploading all of these random photos and then I noticed this pattern in the app. I can’t find it anymore now though so maybe they dropped it, the photos are no longer autoselected in group.
As a business owner basically I have to report 80% of the photos people upload.
Same, I am an extensive google maps user and I see so many (home) family and kids pictures in any random place. The UI is not clear on what happens. Even I did it once nearly accidentally. At the same time, there are some funny ones in between. One person uploaded Caribbean beach pictures to the local public pool.
Seems like after about the twentieth time Google could at least block someone from making changes, but apparently that's not considered a technical problem so nobody's interested.
I have some photos shared that I took in a restaurant if not at the end of the world then in a related place, far far away from Italy. The name of the restaurant however contains something that people will often search for in connection with Italy.
That picture from a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere has maybe a hundred times more views than any of my other images from way more interesting places.
Only reason I can see is it somehow has been mixed in when people searched for that search term, because the number of views on that single image is far more than the number of people in that area and probably more than that plus all tourists that have been there since 15 years ago ;-)
If only they had advanced skills in AI to detect patterns and images. Perhaps one day, Google’s algorithm will improve to not show me irrelevant ads and not show me nudie pics.
Right. I think it’s a combination of their AI sucking and being a smoke and mirror show (ads are just mechanical Turk with buyers doing the labor of keyword matching and messy matches where they don’t care and provide no accountability) and not caring enough to spend resources.
>"User Generated Content is great, innit? As a company, I want users to submit photos, so I don't have to do any content curation. Moderation? Nah mate, stick some AI on there to filter out anything offensive and we're golden."
>"Anyway, I reported it - yay for doing unpaid labour for a megacorporation "
I don't get this sarcastic tone.
User-generated content on Google Maps is pretty solid after all these years. One or two bad apples don't diminish it. And no, I don't think Google have the manpower, nor should they waste theirs, to "curate" or "mod" the content proactively other than dealing with reports.
The author probably has a point for things like YouTube comments since the SNR is so damn low, but GMaps? Really?
> User-generated content on Google Maps is pretty solid after all these years.
In Germany, there are lots of scammers registering domains for businesses that have no Google Page, and owners of restaurants are literally extorted with those practices.
For example, lieferando/takeaway claims business pages with custom domains in an automated process to force restaurants into using their platform, they literally own thousands of domains like "restaurant-name-in-city.de". Additionally the phone number is routed through their VoIP gateway, and it's published everywhere like this. So if people try to call the restaurant, they call through their hotline, which gives them even more power to put pressure on restaurant owners to pay premium.
I'm sorry, but this yelp style mafia shit that this solution allowed is not what I can support in good faith.
How so? Trademarks have to be registered in order to be protected and even then you have to actively pursue potential violations (i.e. "defend it"), lest you lose it anyway.
You really think that your average family restaurant or mom-and-pop store that does offers delivery on the side can afford that?
Besides, in my region there's at least 4 restaurants and hotels named "Black Eagle" in a 10 km radius. You could never protect that name for various reasons.
Because they show not just disregard for customer confusion, they are deliberately using the brand to cause customer confusion and benefit from the good reputation.
But location names are distinctively not brand names. I know that concept might be confusing depending on your cultural background, but in most parts of Europe restaurants aren't chains and their names aren't brands.
Each restaurant is usually a family business and it's perfectly normal to find the same pub or restaurant name in nearby towns.
You completely ignored the "doing unpaid labour for a megacorporation" portion, which is the "sarcastic" point the author is making. Unpaid individuals should not be doing content moderation for Google.
Just don't do it if you don't want? I'm very surprised someone would call marking harmful material on a website "doing content moderation for XXX company". I flag posts on HN in regular basis too, I guess that counts as "doing unpaid labor" as well.
I benefit a lot from GMaps as a community, so I don't mind to contribute some bit.
No, Google don't pay me or anyone in the community, but they provided the platform which isn't nothing. "Cost" is never even in my mind. I just.. use it as a tool.
At this point I guess our values are just different, so I'm not going to argue with that.
Practically speaking, it's unlikely Google don't have a moderation team for GMaps at all, but it's literally impossible for any company to go through all the content at GMaps' scale, even if they tried. User report is alway needed.
This is the online version of picking up the trash when you're at the shopping mall. Some people actually just enjoy improving their immediate surroundings!
"But we make so many cupcakes, it is 'literally impossible' for us to be able to make sure each one is glass free" ... is what some people in this thread defending Google seem to think.
> how any large-scale user-generated content platform can eliminate it
Give an incentive to people to not break the rules. Make accounts cost money, etc. At the moment spam or similar abuse is virtually consequence-free for the spammer. If accounts were paid then there becomes a real monetary downside in having your account banned because of spam.
Silicon Valley loves to pretend like this is an unsolvable problem, but in reality the forums from the good old days somehow managed to keep abuse mostly at bay despite often operating with no budget and unpaid volunteers as moderators.
Finally, if you can't build a platform resilient to abuse, the answer is to not build it instead of building it and letting it pollute the world and be a risk to everyone else. In this particular case the abuse is quite tame but there are other more serious problems mentioned elsewhere in this thread such as scammers using Google Maps as a free lead generator.
The scale of "forums from the good old days" is much smaller by a few orders of magnitude, and even that suffers badly from the eternal september problem once the population rises.
>the answer is to not build it
I think this is also OP's main point, which I particularly don't agree with. The current state of GMaps community with whatever levels of moderation Google put into is a net positive experience for its users. So no, not building it would actually make it worse. And the bad actors are not "bad enough" to the point that is analogous with glass shards in cupcakes.
But again it's subjective so you're entitled to your opinion.
I agree, they are smaller. But if you can't scale them safely then keeping them small is an appropriate solution until a better one becomes available.
> The current state of GMaps community with whatever levels of moderation Google put into is a net positive experience for its users.
I'm not advocating against GMaps entirely, but this feature which apparently allows people to upload pictures in bad taste could go, or at the very least be reworked to make it clear to the users that this is unmoderated/poorly unmoderated and that there might be distasteful stuff in there.
At the moment, the platforms put lots of effort to present themselves as safe spaces when in reality they aren't. At the very least, they could be honest about it and let their users make their own decision as to whether to view the content.
> in reality the forums from the good old days somehow managed to keep abuse mostly at bay despite often operating with no budget and unpaid volunteers as moderators.
When people spot them, they assume that it is accidental, but they are uploaded intentionally by exhibitionists, like in this Google Maps case.