Warning! Beware of This: Yelp app is replacing restaurants phone numbers

[Jerome Marot]

An interesting article if you order food through an app:

Yelp is Screwing Over Restaurants By Quietly Replacing Their Phone Numbers

The phone numbers add tracking before connecting to a restaurant so that Grubhub can bill for a marketing fee.

www.vice.com

The Yelp app lists a restaurant’s direct phone number on the actual listing. But when a user clicks on the “Call” button in the app labeled “Delivery or Takeout,” they are taken to a different number, which is owned by Grubhub.Yelp is pushing customers to Grubhub-owned phone numbers in order to facilitate what Grubhub calls a “referral fee” of between 15 percent and 20 percent of the order total.

The article leads to another one: "Restaurants that don't even deliver are ending up on Grubhub against their will":

Restaurants That Don't Even Deliver Are Ending Up on Grubhub Against Their Will

San Francisco restaurant Kin Khao doesn't do take-out or delivery. So why is it an option on Grubhub and Seamless?

www.vice.com

 

[nicolas claris]

How human intelligence can be misused for dishonest purposes will always amaze me...
I don't understand greed and greediness... The Internet is just a mirror of our societies and ourselves... Not always nice!
Thanks Jerome for warning about Yelp (which I don't use...)

 

[Jerome Marot]

I am not using Yelp either. My only contact with the company is when I use Apple maps: restaurants can be found on the map, some lead to reviews on Tripadvisor and others lead to reviews on Yelp (and formally on Qype, which Yelp bought). Tripadvisor will open their site with reviews in the built-in browser. Yelp insists on bringing me to the app store to install their app and I won't do that.

But you and I are comparatively old. The new generation finds it hype to use Yelp, install the app, agree to tracking, GPS and notifications, give out their cellphone number so that they can open an account and write reviews and content for free in the app. Yelp thanks them by suggesting restaurants which bid highest to be listed, by taking a 20% fee on their order, as explained in the article above and further by selling their private data to a variety of "partners".

Yelp's revenue in 2019 was a bit over a billion dollars.

 

[Asher Kelman]

The “Credit Rating” Companies are similarly self-serving! They collect out data without permission or by buying it from Google yelp and the like. They then don’t look after it and get hacked. Now they join with Norton Security to sell you packages to safeguard your own data which they collected in the first place, so your identity won’t be stolen!

Asher

 

[Jerome Marot]

Credit rating works very differently in the US and in Europe, so I am less concerned by that particular problem.

But Yelp, Tripadvisor and... Google work a bit like shady tourist guides. You may have experienced them when traveling: they are young, approach unsuspecting tourists and appear to be from the city. They would always tell you about the great places they know, with great deals "not for the ordinary tourist". In most cases, you end up paying a lot more for standard tourist junk and spend your valuable vacation time in places you did not really want to visit. In some cases, fortunately rare, your family may need to inquire why you were never to be seen again.

Yelp, Tripadvisor and Google operate in the same manner, except that they have your name, address and credit card number.