I highly doubt the government would trust a service like that for such problems or even waste their valuable time. I'm sure they have much more efficient ways of detecting this then trying to sift through that junk. It's also very easy to manipulate check-in's (Foursquare specifically), in respect to checking into locations when you don't actually have to be there, physically. And as far as Facebook goes, you can check others into a location, which could easily spike false information.
I've heard, no first-person knowledge here, that upon suspecting a business, taxation agencies are not unknown to send out a person with a clicker to tally patronage during spcific time periods and see if that lines up with their expectations and what the business reports. As others have said, this could be one of many signals to use in determining who to follow up on.
I guess the more general point I was thinking about is that there are tons of new signals that governments or private groups could use to assess all sorts of activities. For example the government has easy access to cellphone density data from carriers, which would be harder to game. Foursquare check-ins could be a cheap way to decide which places to look into first.
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I highly doubt the government would trust a service like that for such problems or even waste their valuable time. I'm sure they have much more efficient ways of detecting this then trying to sift through that junk. It's also very easy to manipulate check-in's (Foursquare specifically), in respect to checking into locations when you don't actually have to be there, physically. And as far as Facebook goes, you can check others into a location, which could easily spike false information.
I've heard, no first-person knowledge here, that upon suspecting a business, taxation agencies are not unknown to send out a person with a clicker to tally patronage during spcific time periods and see if that lines up with their expectations and what the business reports. As others have said, this could be one of many signals to use in determining who to follow up on.
I've heard of tax inspectors counting the cars parked outside small businesses to get an idea of number of customers.
I guess the more general point I was thinking about is that there are tons of new signals that governments or private groups could use to assess all sorts of activities. For example the government has easy access to cellphone density data from carriers, which would be harder to game. Foursquare check-ins could be a cheap way to decide which places to look into first.