A man's pay-to-use toilet gag showed Google Maps can be used to track people

This is pretty crazy. It's always interesting to see just how tech can fail and expose private information in ways that no one really expected.

Edit: I wonder if this is already patched? I tried looking in my neighbourhood and there are quite a few home businesses. None of the ones I've clicked on have provided a busy time, but the shops just across the road has the busy times widget.

"A few years back, Will added a share house as a McDonald’s restaurant. It didn’t didn’t last long before it was removed by Google, he told Crikey in a phone call this week, but it appeared to fool at least one person. “A car drove past slowly with its driver looking pretty confused,” he said."

Perhaps he could not make the information available on the internet even worse?

So when google shows me the same add 1,000 times from China they're not stalking me on every video I watch? Or they are? It seems like they are or why would they create so many fake low quality videos. You cannot even end up blocking them all.

So anytime I am browsing around Google Maps, I find bogus businesses and fake locations. It is not uncommon for cottage industries to register themselves at the address of a USPS station, for example. Or something like a hairdresser to use her home address. Sometimes, web-only businesses will just register the center of an intersection somewhere seemingly random, hoping nobody will notice, I suppose.

Google is totally responsive to reports about this fakery and they usually publish my suggestions within 0-24 hours. Since Maps is already crowdsourced, they like to get this information from real users and refine what they've got, because it typically just operates on a heapin' helpin' of trusting strangers.