Doesn't Google track all of our locations? Why does it let people leave reviews of American restaurants when it knows they've never been outside of India?
I don't use any Google products on my phone or laptop and very few apps outside of Apple Maps have my location. I could go somewhere and leave a review without them knowing if I've been there. I mean they probably still know but they can't admit to it. :)
If Google were to prioritize authenticity of reviews they could reject reviews from users that cannot be tracked to the reviewed location for whatever reason. It's not that they are afraid of tracking users.
Might be more difficult for other platforms not maintaing full movement profiles of their users.
Locations services on phones use more than just GPS though. It'd be quite easy for Google to add a "Verfied" tag to a review if your GPS history includes the restaurant and a few points around the restaurant, and your WiFi SSID history includes a few of the same SSIDs that other reviewers logged, and there's a photo of the food that includes meta data that matches, etc. It could all be spoofed too but it'd become increasingly difficult.
SSID history and photo metadata are also spoofable.
At some point, only the spoofers will pass all the anti-spam gates, or you'll end up letting many of their reviews past in order to avoid blocking real users. At that point, it's starting to look like the wikipedia "be sure to read the chat page for this article if you actually care about this topic" problem.
They don't seem to. Here in central Texas, a restaurant enforced its trespassing rules and the guy decided to summon his hordes to start logging bad reviews for the restaurant. Yelp locked down the reviews for this place fairly quickly but Google Maps allowed the lies to build up without limit.
