Google Play Store deploy AI driven anti-spam system to remove fake reviews

Google has announced to introduce AI driven anti-spam system on its Play Store to remove millions of fake reviews and ratings including crooked apps, posted through unethical practices, thus undermining user trust.

In a report, Google said that its Play Store was being subject to crooked content, reviews that were vile or off topic, along with fake ratings to manipulate an app’s average score. It was also plagued with incentivisation issues, whereby people gave ratings and reviews in exchange for money or valuable terms.

Play store users or developers, those follow unethical practices like incentivised ratings often lead to bloated average app ratings as well. Developers run campaigns where they offer users money or valuable in-app purchases in return for good ratings and reviews. This leads to false praise just for that incentive, and it isn't necessarily the true opinion of the user. Google says that its new AI driven system is able to recognize such an event as well, and take appropriate action. As mentioned, the system will also recognize reviews that use profane language, are off-topic, or spread hate. It will also recognize suspicious sudden increase or decrease in average ratings of apps.

Presently there are a plenty of sites that you can find that offer Play Store reviews, and they are not even human-powered review forms and hence It's not going to be an easy fight for Google. Most are just front businesses for Android bot-nets. Cyber-criminals infect Android phones with malware, and then use the malware as a bot to rate apps, place reviews, or install apps on demand, which is part of a pay-per-install marketing scheme. 

Google finds that it doesn't solely rely on machine learning to take action against developers, apps, ratings, and reviews. In its developers' blog, Google mentions, "In 2018, the Google Play Trust & Safety teams deployed a system that combines human intelligence with machine learning to detect and enforce policy violations in ratings and reviews. A team of engineers and analysts closely monitor and study suspicious activities in Play's ratings and reviews, and improve the model's precision and recall on a regular basis. We also regularly ask skilled reviewers to check the decisions made by our models for quality assurance."

Google appeals to developers not to buy incentivized ratings or fake them in any way. It asks them to not run campaigns that offer in-app purchases in return for 5-star rating or a good review. Furthermore, it urges users to not accept app incentives in exchange for reviews and ratings, or use profane, hateful, or sexual language in reviews. While the tech giant will continue to fish for spam reviews and apps, the company also requests users and developers to keep a lookout, and report such reviews as soon as they spot it. Users can mark the review as spam and developers can submit feedback through the Play Console.

Hopefully the new initiative from Google for its Play Store can at least make a dent and deter others from purchasing fake reviews and ratings.