I saw this first-hand in finance. They ended up "disavowing" the listings so they had no control over them. Now the individual offices can't set their hours, but I guess it made compliance happy.
That should be Google's problem, if it wasn't above the law.
(Which country/industry?)
I like the fact that there's a third party controlling reviews, not the company itself. We all know how legit those Testimonials on websites are... I agree that it can have a bad effect, fake reviews are bad, but better than only fake reviews hosted by the company they're about.
I read about a case of (I think it was) a hair salon owner where Facebook automatically created a Facebook business page for them. They sued and they were forced to delete it.
Because well, that seems like misrepresentation, or straight up fraud.
But publishing reviews of your business sounds well within the bounds of freedom of speech.
Pretending that the page hosting those reviews is affiliated with you, probably not legal unless you have agreed to it.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.
But my business never had anything to do with Google, so I never signed any T&Cs
At this point TCs of megacorps are basically creating a parallel legal system
Anyway - no customer gave us any review on google and our website is full of recommendation letters. But at some point google started nagging our employees to put reviews since they visited our office.
Guess what happened. We got our first review from an employee we were not happy with and planned to gracefully close our cooperation with.
This is against Google policy. So we complained. We had to spend significant time to get to a real person at Google and get this removed.
After a year similar situation happened. I thought ok - this should be easy the second time. No way - this time all the emails we knew did not respond, we could not reach anybody. We flagged the review several times. We could not do anything about that.
It is like a person can just put a shit on your office wall and you could not clean it. And shit owner - Google doesn't care.
We were forced to play by the rules and we bought 50 reviews to paint our wall. The company that provided this service was a Google partner. They explained that 80-90% of reviews of everything is written for money.
And the best thing - once we started getting our reviews, the flagged reviews were finally removed. Seems like AI decided the we are a good company.
Do you think we did something wrong? Immoral? Or just played business on a not leveled field?
And to summarize. I do not care about reviews. And we have money to fight back with lawyers or PR. But it is sad that some businesses don't have this option and somebody (Google) can harm them through reviews they did not ask for.