As a business owner, it's your job to make sure those listings are accurate, just as it would be you would want to make sure the yellow pages had your right phone number. There's no excuse for technological illiteracy or ignorance, and if you don't want to bother to be in charge of your online presence, you had better hire someone for the job.
> There's no excuse for technological illiteracy or ignorance, and if you don't want to bother to be in charge of your online presence, you had better hire someone for the job.
I hate to disagree with this because I sympathize strongly with the underlying sentiment, but I have to disagree anyway in this case. If you had just said that business owners who don't have an online presence could benefit from having one, I would certainly agree. But if, for whatever reason, a business owner does not have an online presence, that does not give online entities like Google an excuse to publish false factual information about them. The operating hours of a business are factual information, and if Google is going to let such information appear on its site, it has a responsibility to verify its accuracy with the actual business owner.
> There's no excuse for technological illiteracy or ignorance
I know the internet is much more popular since the last 10 years, but I don't think everyone is really up to it. There are still big opportunities to scam people who don't have the minimum of tech savyness: viruses, etc.
The internet is still a jungle with not enough laws.
There are many areas of the law which have been untouched for decades, and only starts now to create new cases because of how the internet works. Couchsurfing for example. Also scamming has never been so easy with the internet.
I'm not saying you really need laws, but regulations might improve the situation. There's nothing really illegal there, but it would be nice to see google being liable for its data if it reach a certain size of audience. In this case it's false advertising of defamation (unintentional).
Google map is a product, even if it hides behind a free thing "use with caution". Most people can get along with it, but if it starts to have a big impact on society, people will indeed become wary and learn, but not everyone will do.
I guess you can say "let the nature do its work", but that's not always how government see things, and that's not why the government exists. Strong government can do big improvements, I think. It depends, that's a balance to find.
What if the owner has no idea that his business even has an online presence? I can see that being very common amongst older business owners, especially if they have never even used Google before.
I think if the gp had said "As a business owner, it's in your best interests...", there would be less to argue about (without really changing the meaning).
I think it's likely that he had little interest in the online presence of his business, but he must also have missed opportunities to better manage it (I'm thinking of information from a chamber of commerce or similar, or just conversations with people).
