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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like what you're saying is that Apple should not list any company that does not create a direct contract with them and guarantee provision of accurate information?

To me that would imply small businesses that can't afford the time to go through such a process would be hard pressed to stay listed.

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Apple should not publish false information that unfairly damages other companies' business. When they do so, they should compensate those other companies, and accept that as a cost of being in the publishing-information-about-other-companies business. If Apple can't afford to publish accurate information about every business then yes they should publish only information that they've specifically confirmed, or refrain from publishing at all.

Alternatively, the company should have ensured that wherever (or whoever) they were providing data for were providing accurate information. Apple got that information from somewhere, and wherever they got it from presumably got it from the store in the first place[1]. Apple provides methods in the maps UI to report corrections, and another thread says there's a business connections site that you can use to ensure correct information manually.

This sounds very much like "I want to be automatically included in these map services, but I don't want to do any work to ensure accuracy".

In terms of "company with lots of money should be able to manually verify every entry", I can't find info on Apple Maps, but at a general approximation of scale google talks about 200 million businesses and points of interest[2], yelp alone has 5 million[3] and operates in a relatively small area.

Let's be conservative and say apple is at 50 million. Let's guesstimate 5 minutes per verification and now you have 250 million minutes of work just to validate this information once. Assuming a 40 hours per week, that would require 2000+ people full time employees doing nothing but calling to constantly [re-]verify business information. That would be (according to wikipedia) a 1% increase in the number of employees for the entire company, just for information that could easily be kept more accurate by the business owner. For google's 200 million PoIs you obviously require 8000 full time employees which for them would be a 6% increase in their work force.

It's super easy to say "well these companies have lots of money and so should be able to be 100% accurate", but the scale of these services does not actually make that true, especially when there are systems that allow business owners to just report the correct information directly.

[1] For whatever it's worth wikipedia says it gets information "provided by approximately twenty companies, including Booking.com, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, and Yelp" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maps

[2] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/how-goo...

[3] https://gitnux.org/yelp-statistics/#:~:text=Yelp%20has%20mor....

It is super easy to say "Well, business owners have mechanisms to correct false information", but this requires the business owner to regularly check not just Apple Maps, but every such service (which he might not have even heard of), find out the process to correct the information on each service that has it wrong, possibly prove to these services that he is who he says he is and is also the owner of the business (potentially subjecting himself to phishing attacks). And, if the onus is not on those businesses to not publish false information, even after all that, they could just ignore him. Even if successful, if these systems are not well-designed that information might be overwritten with the next update from whatever source originally offered up the false information.

No, the publisher doesn't get to be off the hook because "it's hard to be accurate."

My guess is that Apple et al have contracts which indemnify them and if he is the ultimate source, he's already signed away any right to damages for information he provided (and maybe information he didn't).

> It's super easy to say "well these companies have lots of money and so should be able to be 100% accurate", but the scale of these services does not actually make that true

What difference does the scale make? Just look at the unit economics. If they can't afford to spend 5 minutes verifying this data point before sending it out to thousands or millions of users, maybe they shouldn't be sending it out at all; that's true whether you have 1 data point or 1 billion. If they're going to make the effort to publish it, they should make the effort to verify it. Or if they think their accuracy rate without verification is "good enough", they should accept the consequences of that and pay fair compensation when they screw up.

Better to be unlisted than have a third party use your trademark to authoritatively claim you've permanently closed.

The business is actively harmed if you list them as closed. I don't see how this is the fault of the business.

They could list the business because they want it in the map without listing the hours or that it's closed.

This is the way.

The deep pockets and scale of the damage Big Corp can do against a small player is extensive.

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