I recently commented how Google+’s pages were open to people creating fake profiles on famous figures despite having a strict real name policy for regular profiles. It seems that somebody proved my theory correct as a false Bank of America page was created on Google Plus making a mockery of the nation’s largest bank. The page included a number of posts and images attacking the bank while each one was shared and +1’d by some of the 500 followers of the page. One of these posts included the following message:
“Starting tomorrow, all Occupy Wall Street protestors with Bank of America accounts around the country will have their assets seized as part of BofA’s new Counter-Financial-Terrorism policy. You will sit down and shut up, or we will foreclose on you.”
How will Google stop incidents like this in the future?
This process now known as “brandjacking” has been seen on a number of social networks but it seems that Google+ has become a victim too due to the lack identity protection for their pages release. There are concerns over the fact it was able to be put up in the first place (on November 8th) and managed to survive a week without being taken down until Bank of America shared their concerns with Google. Since my previous post about Google+ pages it looks like the verification tick has been introduced to pages but I still believe creating pages has to be a harder process to complete to avoid cases like this happening on a frequent basis.
Surely it would be simple to ask page creators to introduce a unique meta tag to their site in order to verify they own it?
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