#634: SecureWhere

People have come to recognise the dangers of having one’s identity stolen online.

Today’s invention deals with a new threat, that of location theft. I’ve discovered that some of the geographical details which are supplied by Google are surprisingly inaccurate. These are submitted by individual users and often don’t get checked and fixed by locals (who obviously never look at the maps of their home location).

It occurred to me that one way to screw up a competitor’s business might be to supply Google with false information about their physical location. If customers can’t find them, they are toast.

The simplest approach to dealing with this is to reflect any location information about a business or institution submitted to a search engine, or other online resource, to an email address on the company’s website for confirmation.