I was saddened to see LGs who just copy articles from places like Huffington post and take photos from websites and post them as their own reviews. They get a lot of likes, their reviews are given a high trust score then their reviews become promoted as they can teach high levels by coping and pasting other people’s work.
After spending a huge amount of time trying to write up honest reviews it kind of infuriated me to the point of reporting them but since I don’t write for HuffPo or own these photos I don’t believe I have the option to report them via https://services.google.com/forms/policy_report.html
What options do we have to prevent these people from using copied content in their reviews when we do not own the copyright?
Absolutely you can report them @caribooooou what I recommend is that you gather some evidence of a couple of sample reviews and where they and the photos were copied from for each person. Then post into How-Tos topic “I want to report a Local Guide” and a Googler will reach out to you privately.
If you wish to short cut that you can send the information to me via private message and I will review, if it looks warranted I will escalate for investigation via the moderator channel. If you want to do that I’ll need
link to the persons maps profile
the specific place the review is on with a link to the review if possible
In this case, since you’ve found a specific person, I will send you a private message with instructions on how to report this specific person so our team can look into their account and take any appropriate action, though we won’t be able to share the final decision as we respect everyone’s privacy. We ask that you do not share any information publicly about the person you think may be violating our policies as we respect everyone’s privacy.