- there are people inside of Google, working for Google, that manually accessed web data of Mocality and then phoned Mocality clients making fraudulent claims about Mocality and practically trying to extort the money from the clients. Note that those in Google can't be "just some local Kenyans" as Mocality recored systematic access from Google India after access from Kenya stopped:
- "8 different user agents mostly running Chrome on Linux"
It's so cries "Google" and it can be much more than eight people doing this, as, for example, all machines where hard disks are duplicated or are simply similarly configured would have the same user agent.
Is it? At the most some team inside went rampant and will probably be fired. Aren't there bound to be some black sheep in any organization with 1000s of members?
The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous.
It obviously can't be just "some team" when it spans minimum two continents, some small bad guys in Kenyan team are certainly not able to move the "local" operation to India.
The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous.
For real, right? Next thing they'll tell us is that Google would assist companies in displaying illegal drug ads in the US for profit. This is Google we're talking about. Have people already forgotten their motto is "Don't be evil"? You can't have that motto and do evil stuff -- it wouldn't be consistent.
You seem to have good and evil confused. Speaking as someone who's just ordered a number of meds online, helping me find the meds I need is "good". Trying to hinder this activity and censor it for stupid damn reasons is "bad".
I don't know about that story, in any case putting illegal ads on your public web site seems a weird way to make money. Wouldn't it be rather easy to find you and sue you? I am sure the police knows where Google Headquarters are??
>"The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous."
Google's management has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to maximize profits. Running an eight person call center with wages competitive for the local market in Kenya is pretty cheap - but apparently not cheap enough, thus the operation was moved to India.
This wasn't rouge warriors led by one bad supervisor - the level of authority was sufficient to move operational production from the local manager to another continent. People up the food chain looked at what was happening and decided to scale it.
How much authority does a junior manager need to outsource telesales to India? And how many people have oversight over the suggested telephone scripts?
Possibly Googler's could shed some light on internal processes for things like that but my guess would be (i)not much if a business case for "engaging with Kenyan businesses" has already been agreed on by regional managers and (ii) one or two
I wouldn't expect the people that had oversight over the telephone scripts to still have a job by the end of next week, mind you.
> Google's management has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to maximize profits.
You need to stop using that word, you don't know what it means. "Fiduciary" has nothing to do with "maximizing profits", corporate executives and directors have no such responsibility. You are perpetuating a dangerous, damaging, and extremely ignorant myth pushed by robber-barons as an excuse for their immoral and unethical behavior.
>"We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved."
Dear Google,
Last I checked, you have been in the business of finding other people's digital information on the web, aggregating it, and offering it up as your product for more than a decade. For the past several years, your business model has increasingly relied upon encouraging web users to add more content to the web - Google+ upon which this post appears being but the latest example.
If Mocality is correct in its claim that Google did not approach them about using their data, then it is hard to see how what has happened could be a surprise. Such naivety about the way the web works is simply not credible.
The persons responsible for this are not in Africa or India. They are the people responsible for oversight; they in the executive offices at the Googleplex - and I suspect that most of the regret is that this time you were caught in the honeypot.
I hope Google isn't that tone deaf. Jobs got a lot right, and one of them is at the VP-level you don't have excuses. The janitor can have excuses, but if this is under your watch -- it's under your watch.
I felt like Google played dumb with the drug ads thing and didn't really hold people accountable (Page was hardly rebuked) -- here they need to come down hard to show that they're serious about "Don't be evil" -- or is that just a useful motto when you're the young underdog.
The problem runs deeper. Google hired a lot of creeps during their huge hiring sprees in the mid/late 2000s. Don't forget that Google has been the #1 job choice for MBA grads since around 2006. Their semi autistic hiring process gets people with high IQs but does nothing to weed out amoral weirdos or even just plain assholes. One reason I have never responded to their recruitment efforts is that every psycho I've worked with over the past decade is now a manager at Google.
Not sure why people ever believed that Don't be evil propaganda. You can hand out all those cute Google t-shirts, pens, give free lunches, give free massages, give mom's good maternity, etc.. doesn't really matter..
You're a business and a public one at that... that means you'll do anything for profit, just like every other company.
Google's two-tier share structure specifically means they do not need to act in anyway that Page and Brin don't want to.
Even if every other shareholder hated everything they did, Page & Brin's shares will always out-vote them because each share they own is worth 10 votes of anyone else.[1]
[1] "The actual voting power of the insiders is much higher, however, as Google has a dual class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
"Last I checked, you have been in the business of finding other people's digital information on the web, aggregating it, and offering it up as your product for more than a decade."
I believe there is an important difference between indexing Mocality's content and the things that Mocality is upset about. I believe is is reasonable to expect Google not to call your customers and pretend to represent a join venture, lie about your offering to them, and to pressure them into buying something.
<joke>For one thing, that doesn't sound like a very scalable crime model.</joke>
I take this to mean that they were Google contractors, or other representative third party.
In any case, I feel like an apology is insufficient here - it sounds like what these guys have done has significantly harmed the reputation of Mocality, perhaps in an irreversible way. I'm not usually one to leap on the "payday from big company" bandwagon, but IMO Google needs to do more to make this right than simply apologizing and firing.
"I take this to mean that they were Google contractors, or other representative third party."
That's what he wants you to take it to mean but that's likely not accurate. If no Google employees were involved I'd expect a quote that said so and this doesn't.
I have confidence that Google employees were not involved with the fraud aspects of what occurred here but that's not the same thing as saying that this project was 100% contractors. Indications are actually the opposite, see mocality's post* and the project's website http://www.kbo.co.ke/ ("managed by Google").
That's a good point - if it were purely contractors, they'd probably say something like "some of our contractors were over-zealous; they are being dealt with". It's hard to come up with a plausible reason they'd protect contractors so strongly, since Google's reputation wouldn't really be under fire to the same degree as if an employee had done so / been told to do so.
I just had a hard time coming to grips with the idea of a billionaire company committing outright fraud for ten dollar domain names.
The fraudsters may well have been Google employees and/or contractors. I think Willful at metafilter put it best [1]:
I worked at Google for a few years. My experience is that it's like any other huge multinational corporation in that there are regional teams that get more or less supervision. They're also somewhat hamstrung in that in certain regional hiring situations, they have to focus on getting someone who can speak the local language over getting someone of their normal standard of ethics and acceptable background.
As a result I saw people working in Google who did evil things, pure and simple, especially in the more obscure markets to reach their sales targets. When they were caught they were fired, when they didn't and succeeded as a result, they were promoted.
This type of thing will always happen. Thinking it won't is a bit childish. It's Google's official response and subsequent actions that defines their culture.
Google deals in information. It handles information from internet content and internet users world-wide, yet it doesn't have enough internal information as to let a team go rampant like this for months.
Even if they outsourced it, I can't believe Google would just black-box the process and simply expect 'x' result from the outsource company, that's just an endorsement of shady activity.
So presumably, Kenyans have neither normal standards of ethics nor acceptable backgrounds? Like most other posters speaking in favour of Google, Willful displays an arrogance I can't quite understand. I'd be really curious about what you'd have to say if this was some American (or other "acceptable background") startup.
If you were feeling generous you could interpret it as saying that 'is competent & is ethical & speaks english' is necessarily a bigger hiring pool than 'is competent & is ethical & speaks english & speaks the local language'. The identity of 'local language' is irrelevant, trying to find bilingual candidates always narrows the hiring pool.
> they have to focus on getting someone who can speak the local language
So, for you it's just some small "regional team" when they stop calling from Kenya, after speaking local language, and then some people from Google India take over?
Funny, I take this to mean that they aren't quite sure what happened yet. However, they are investigating and trying to figure out what happened, and trying to get out in front of this PR-wise.
If Google were significantly unsure, it is unlikely that they would have apologized and it is unlikely that the would be preparing for "taking the appropriate action with the people involved."
In other words, if it was a simple breech of contract, the steps would be straight forward and easy to list as I suspect that actions which bring disrepute upon Google are covered in Google's standard contracts.
Yeah, this was posted at 10:30 MTV time, so there wasn't enough time for head office in MTV to figure out what's gone on and what to do/say about it yet.
This comment from the link above sums it up nicely: "I think it’s all a matter of context and intention. If someone who generally respects PR professionals uses the term “flack” informally (as I myself have done in a recent blog post), then I’m fine with it. If someone else is using the term as a derogatory remark to show lack of respect for the profession, then it makes me mad."
Just thought I'd share the above for any other HN readers. Using the word "flack" is seen by many PR professionals as a sign of disrespect.
Except it went on for months, even if they outsourced a team that just happened to interpret its orders "creatively", having such a scam operate under your watch, while you're paying them, is--to put it mildy--quite the oversight.
Thanks - Plus links that are talking about Google are really confusing, it's impossible to tell from the post if the person is affiliated with Google or not, but it always leaves that impression in my mind, and that impression is often wrong.
This G+ post is a PR blunder. You should never apologize for something and then say that you are still gathering the facts about it. Second, you don't offer to sacrifice other people (while not yet having the facts). You either don't or you self sacrifice. Third, telling the public about an apology to someone else seems desperate. Just apologize. If there is actual public fervor, wait a few days and, like things your dog ate, news of the apology will come out from the other end. Finally, if you're a business with lots of money that other people want, it's probably best not to say anything. Get your lawyer to say it. That is what they are paid for.
And Google is evil. they track everything you do online, where your phone goes, and what you search for and sell that information, for fuck's sake.
Damned if you do, damned you don't - had they not mentioned it people would be pissed that they're so brazen as to think they can do something like this and just get away with it. As it is I like Google's personable way of taking early responsibility, even without all the details, just to let the concerned public know that they are aware of the issue and taking it seriously.
I'll take the other side of that bet. Do you know how much money it costs to send someone to prison? Quite a lot. And that doesn't include how much it costs to keep them there.
Aside: the downvoting of unpopular but nonetheless cogent and well put arguments here is getting rather silly; will pg step in to sort this out. IMO this has got worse and worse since comment scores were hidden.
With a large company things like this need to be addressed; a lot of time the incentives are perverse to set this up. Consider WalMart. I am 99% certain that no execs there say "make your employees work off the clock" but they definitely have incentives for managers to get more work done with the same payroll, which translates to an incentive to engage in illegal behavior.
"Google is said to have outsourced all jobs of getting business on KBO to India’s Iridium Interactive. The calls must have been originating from Iridium both in Kenya and India. In Kenya they are located on 7th floor Pushotam place and the key local contact is listed as Juliet Gacheri while in India they also share an address with Google."
I believe the point is that within the past month Google's "Do no evil" has jumped the shark. It no longer exists. But some people still trust them for some reason that I dont understand. Maybe because Matt Cutts seems like a nice guy or they are just hanging on to google's past. In addition to this Mocality deal, what stands out is their blatant favoritism of Google+ in their search results.
Google has been preaching for years about relevancy and unbiased search results. Even testifying in DC - http://searchengineland.com/mr-cutts-goes-to-washington-6123... - Google’s results are determined by an algorithm and not tweaked to get particular sites ranking well. - Yet they now have tweaked their results in order to place their Google+ brand above results that are much more relevant than theirs.
Some might argue, "hey, it is Google's website - they can do what they want." I used to think like this too, but the reality is that this behavior is bad for consumers and bad for businesses. Especially smaller businesses. This isn't just about Facebook and Twitter... there are hundreds of smaller niche content players that will be pushed aside by this. And as Google has to grow to keep shareholders happy, they will have to move into more and more content. If this still seems like a stretch see the example below.
What if there were only 2 companies that owned land in San Francisco and New York? One of them was named Google and they owned 70% of San Francisco and 90% of New York. In the beginning Google allowed anyone to rent their land for retail stores. So you had all different kind of companies providing different kinds of products in their stores. Hundreds of different businesses. Then all of the sudden Google decided to take over those retail locations and sell their own goods. They also sold other company's goods, but they were way back in the store. Hidden away. So if you were walking down the street in New York, 90% of the time a store would be owned by Google and 90% of the time you would only see marginal Google products. Now would that be good for business? Who would go into business? It would be so hard to compete. Would that be good for the consumer?
I believe in free enterprise, but only to a certain extent. There is a reason why antitrust laws exist. If they didn't, companies like Google never would have existed. We would all be working for Rockefeller.
Richard Champling...I couldnt hold back from commenting on your accusations that we may have ochestrated this deliberately. I head the Mocality team in Kenya...and we did not 'Ochestrate' this. Building a directory in Africa isnt as easy as just going around and knocking on doors. Our success was largely based on our ability to build and maintain a large agent network (15,000+ strong). These agents collect information that forms the bulk of our directory. However, for the agents...work isnt as simple as going around and knocking on doors. A lot of the population is still very suspicious about the internet and new technologies. People have fallen prey to scams for merely giving out their cell phone numbers...people are kidnapped etc.
Agents have the task of building trust with business owners in many cases just to extract their correct business details. Convincing them of the 'need' to be online, is not as easy as it seems. To facilitate this, the Mocality team in Kenya spends a lot of time travelling around, holding agent and business seminars and slowly turning our name and mission into something the local business person can trust.
Therefore...when google launch a new product like KBO into the market, it is quite clear to us in the country, that they would have similar hurdles to climb when recruiting businesses. These hurdles are in some way a competitive advantage to us, as we've already spent tons of man hours going past them. Google would still need to build the trust...and the business owner would need to be comfortable working with them.
For Mocality, the businesses trust our agents and we use our agents to introduce products to them.
Therefore, when google employees/agents call and say that we are working together, they are taking advantage of the relationship of trust we have worked so hard to build...in order to release their product easily into the market.
How does this look for us? It's a domino effect...
Our agents have no idea about the sites business owners call to ask them about, and their confusion makes the business owners suspicious about working with them further...the agents get upset with us for not informing them of new products or partnerships with google, as they are losing livelihoods...and we are left perplexed that a company of the stature like google is blatantly telling lies. Perhaps worse for us here are the allegations being made that we plan to charge Kshs 20,000 for some services...which is way more than an average business would be willing to spend. So...did we orchestrate this? we clearly did not. And as my CEO Stefan said in his blog...we have always been keen to form viable partnerships within Kenya, and google is a company we have looked at working with. So we dont understand why we werent asked about partnership possibilities if they really wanted to use our information. Really encouraged by the massive support we've seen online from so many people so far though. Very encouraging.
I am not sure why he even needs two paragraphs before coming to the point: Google was basically phishing by pretending that they were partnered with Mocality.
Isn't that what a phishing scam is? I lie and tell hotmail customers, for example, that I am from hotmail or somehow partnered with hotmail and that I need your password(or credit card). That's almost criminal.
> Google was basically phishing by pretending that they were partnered with Mocality.
It's a bit disingenuous to equate some Google employees from doing this with Google as a company doing it. I could be very wrong here (and would be extraordinarily disappointed in the company if so), but I doubt this was a corporate-sanctioned activity.
When an engineer at google comes up with a great idea during work hours not sanctioned by google, google still owns that idea and its success. Not the individual.
This is an important point. I am reading a lot of defence on here for google and there is little to back it up. This isn't a minor oversight executed by a small team, rather the precise opposite.
I would say Google's reply has been a lie(dare I say "utter bullshit") - an idea like this doesn't accidentally become implemented. It wasn't even implemented in a small way, both being executed from inside google and google finding it worthwhile to pay a separate company to expand the program for them. (A company doing exactly what google has asked of them, to the point of google having to approve the scripts used by callers.)
This is incredibly bad of them, and while "HQ" might not have fully understood the methods being used they wouldn't have not known nothing about it. It's about on par with News Corp executives pretending they didn't know about voicemail-hacking.
Following the same reasoning we shouldn't laud Google for all the great stuff they did either, like GMail, Search, etc.
Sorry it's one or the other.
I know I like to say, we're IT and if anything goes wrong it's not our fault, but if anything goes extremely well, we'll take the credit--but then I know I'm being facetious :)
> Following the same reasoning we shouldn't laud Google for all the great stuff they did either, like GMail, Search, etc.
You know, why not think of Google (or Microsoft, or any other Zaibatsu-pretending-to-be-one-brand) as companies resident within a start-up incubator? Treating Google's Adsense team as the same "culture" as Google's Search team makes about as much sense as treating Sony Pictures as being the same company as Sony Computer Entertainment, or Virgin Airlines as being the same company as Virgin Mobile.
So, don't say "Google did this to GMail today" or "Google's search is amazing" or "Google merged their Page Creator into Google Sites"; instead, say "The GMail team launched this today" or "I love the Google Search folks" or "Google Page Creator got bought out by Google Sites."
If YCombinator funded/supported say a company that allowed your house to get trashed with no reparations or attempt to make good, then yes I'd hold that against YCombinator. Ultimately Google Inc. is where the money funnels to & is ultimately responsible for it's subcultures.
This idea that Google can't be held responsible for bad employee behavior is borderline religious. Praise Google when it does something good, let Google off the hook when it does something bad.
Google has mentioned a lot of times that various projects started from 20% projects of specific people. The post you're replying to was so ridiculous it wasn't bearing me responding.
Nonsense. You can't draw an equals sign between two actions just because they sounds similar. One is a completely legal action by an employee in good standing. The other is a crime. They are not the same thing and should not be treated as such.
The guy talking to businesses wasn't talking on his own behalf. He was representing Google and acting on Google's behalf. It's stupid to suggest that he was doing this for his own profit.
Have you looked at the transcript of his conversation? Would he be using an '@gmail.com' address instead of an '@google.com' address if he was doing it on Google's behalf?
Um...yes, it is. Take any 10k+ employee company, can you as a company guarantee that no employer will "do no evil"? That's impossible.
I'm not trying to defend Google here, but just saying that an act made by an employee at a company is equal to a given strategy by the same company is just ludicrous.
The scam was going on for months. It's not something that some employee did without telling anyone, hidden away in some office. You can't possibly contact all those businesses during work hours at google without some boss asking you what you are working on and what you are doing. And if that is possible inside google, imho something is very wrong.
I find it very hard to believe that anyone significant knew about this at Google. Do you really think that they are in such dire straits that they have to scam Africans for profit?
It went on for months, even if they outsourced a team that just happened to interpret its orders "creatively", having such a scam operate under your watch, while you're paying them, is--to put it mildy--quite the oversight.
You clearly have never worked with an outsourced team. Shit like this can happen with the utmost of ease - unless Google has an internal time constantly involved in the actual area of the outsourced team.
Months is an incredibly short period of time for a large organization. Especially when considering a small, probably low priority group. A large organization isn't like a startup, for a small low priority group the feedback loop isn't daily, its at best weekly and quite possibly longer even monthly (and gets longer as you go up the corporate ladder). What you may identify about a groups activities in a couple weeks at a small company can easily take months in a large company.
I would be curious what your thoughts are on Murdoch and the News of the World scandal. In that case everyone seems to think that Murdoch new or should have known yet in this case Google execs get a pass?
> It's not something that some employee did without telling anyone, hidden away in some office.
Awesome; since you seem to have more facts than anyone else in this emotion-laden thread, please lay them out for us. Perhaps you're right; I simply don't know, but since you seem to have evidence of this, I'm sure Google legal would love to see it.
I don't. I just repeated what Nelson Mattos wrote on his blog.
"a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites."
There's some slight differences between "Google as a company is responsible for the actions, even the unknown unsanctioned actions, of their employees" and "Google is responsible, and they did it deliberately."
The former is recognised in some laws in some jurisdictions (off the top of my head: In England a company director is responsible for the piracy of their employees during company time, even if the director doesn't know about it and didn't ask for it.)
In my opinion it's fine to say that Google is responsible, even if they didn't know about it. Maybe they need to start improving their governance procedures, especially in cultures where bribery and corruption are rampant. "Don't be evil" should include "don't be evil, even if evil is usual in the region we're working in".
No, it is not a valid point. A company must take responsibility for its employees or contractors. It hired them. It is responsible for them. It must be held accountable for them. Why? Because a company is its employees. And yes, a few rotten apples will spoil the party. You judge a company by its worst employees, not its best. That's the way you judge any group. That's why a group worth admiring has the highest standard for membership and mercilessly purges its ranks of bad apples.
No one is saying Google should not take responsibility - they should, and appear to be. Continue being angry at Google as a whole about this incident if they try to sweep it under the rug and do not get rid of those responsible.
I'll also continue being angry until they come up with a better response than a half-assed paragraph on a social network by some guy that doesn't even bother introducing himself or his function within Google.
Mocality's post didn't have the hallmarks of linkbait and based on their description of their business model (patient, capitalized, appropriate to the local) and the sophistication of their honeypot strategy, there was an air of legitimacy.
It was hard to see an upside from them making a false claim - e.g. a flood of unique visitors from around the world would hardly add value to their business (probably more likely to just crash their servers).
In addition, it is hard to see much of a downside for Google, they are still partnering with the biggest bank, largest mobile provider, and the manager of Kenya's top level domain - anyway there's already one Microsoft for people to hate and how much of a hit on eyeballs is a story about screwing over a small company in Africa really going to cause?
This was a rational business decision of the sort that's made everyday by large multinational companies.
This also reminds me of what AirBnB did with CraigsList. You're right - it's done everyday. And let's face it... will anyone remember a month from now?
Mocality is a Kenyan business that gathers and aggregates information about the businesses in Kenya to improve the economic state of the country through information infrastructure.
Google (or, apparently, a group contracted by Google) was mining their data and in turn (effectively) selling it. They were undercutting Mocality while at the same time claiming that they had previous arrangements with Mocality to do so.
"I’d like you to meet Douglas. On this call (first 2 minutes) you can clearly hear Douglas identify himself as Google Kenya employee, state, and then reaffirm, that GKBO is working in collaboration with Mocality, and that we are helping them with GKBO, before trying to offer the business owner a website (and upsell them a domain name). Over the 11 minutes of the whole call he repeatedly states that Mocality is with, or under (!) Google."
Yup, that's pretty much it. The important part is the last bit: they claimed that there was a partnership between Google and Mocality, and used that lie to extract payment from Mocality's clients.
And they (or whoever was making those phone calls) fraudulently misrepresented themselves, thereby committing fraud by the laws of the US. Not sure about Kenyan laws.
The point here is not if Google is evil or not. Obviously, the heads of Google weren't aware of this scam.
The point is that any employee of Google can access such data. And Google holds a lot of data. A real damn lot of data. Moreover, it sounds like it was much more than a lone employee scamming people. It was probably a small organized group.
It means you data, and sometimes your business isn't always safe.
Thus, Google is dangerous. It's not Google's fault. It's just what happens when you get too big or too large.
"The point is that any employee of Google can access such data."
This is just untrue. Only a handful of people at Google have access to each set of data (e-mail, search, etc.), and their access is heavily monitored and restricted. I assure you not every Google employee has access to the kind of data you're worried about.
It seems http://www.kbo.co.ke/ is more or less free (anyone with a google account can create free sites), the only cost seems to be a domain name - follow the money.
It seems like most of the commenters here are treating the evidence of Google's wrongdoing as conclusive. It isn't. A comment on the post by Richard Wooding demonstrated how Joe Random can make requests from a Google IP address:
Yes, but I don't think they can spin it as a "rogue team" really. If it is a team inside Google. That's Google's fault. It doesn't matter whether it's Google's fault because they have poor oversight or too much freedom or because they hire people who are criminal.
No, some regular person at Google behaved unethically. If Google locked down their employees enough to prevent this (which I doubt is even possible), then they wouldn't be able to do anything good either. You're saying: one mistake in a tiny branch office, entire global company goes out of business.
> " You're saying: one mistake in a tiny branch office, entire global company goes out of business."
I don't see that anywhere in the posts above.
I can't speak for other posters, but the price of letting your employees have the freedom to act according to their own initiative is that sometimes, people will fuck up, and the damage may not just be contained to your own company.
Of course, giving employees freedom also means more innovation, fast progress, and generally more happiness.
So the idea is that Google can't just reap the benefits of high-employee-freedom, they also need to bear the responsibilities for the inevitable damage it causes. These employees, acting on behalf of Google, did something bad, and caused real, quantifiable damage to another business - Google needs to take responsibility for this, and I don't just mean a mea culpa on a blog.
Well, hard to say seeing as how the jury's still out on exactly what happened.
If it was a rogue team in Google, there are a few things that come to mind:
- Google needs to refund all customers they acquired via this process and alert them that they were duped.
- Google needs to call every single business that the rogue team called and inform of what happened, and that Google is not affiliated with Mocality in any way whatsoever. Any fraudulent or deceptive claims that Google allegedly made against Mocality also needs to be addressed and recanted - to every single business that Google scraped and called.
A blanket apology and correction, on a site that the vast majority of these businesses will never read, is simply a cop out and wholly insufficient.
"A blanket apology and correction, on a site that the vast majority of these businesses will never read, is simply a cop out and wholly insufficient."
What about the original post gave you the impression that the blog post was the end of things? How about giving the people who are dealing with this a reasonable amount of time do handle it?
You're reading way more into my post than I intended. Like I said, the jury's still out on what precisely happened, it's doubtful Google has yet figured out just what exactly occurred.
My post was responding to jrockway, who seemed to suggest that, because employee freedom leads to innovation and Good Things(tm), that people should simply let things like this slide with an apology, and chalk it up to a price of innovation. That's a load of crap. Real, provable damages needs to be corrected where possible, and compensated where it isn't.
He also didn't seem to be able to imagine any form of remedial action more than apologizing and disciplinary action - as if the real damage caused to another business is but a detail, or something hopelessly unfixable - neither of which are true.
tl;dr: Google probably (probably) is going to make this right, especially with this much flak directed at them. If jrockway was in charge of Google, though, I wouldn't expect the same.
>You're saying: one mistake in a tiny branch office, entire global company goes out of business.
Nope I'm trying to temper your outlandish general statements; and failing.
napierzaza said, roughly, it was Googles fault if they hired criminals and those people were acting criminally either through lack of oversight or otherwise. You said something along the lines of it being expected that Google would commit crimes and that this is merely the cost of innovation. I asked if Google inc. acting criminally bothered you and you appeared to answer that it didn't that it was impossible for them to do good without also committing 'evil'.
TBH I can't really believe anyone who values the rule of law (particular its equal application) could countenance such a position. So, do you believe that rich corporations should be immune from the laws that bind the rest of us?
Hypothetical: If an employee in McDonald's overcharges all the customers do you think that McDonald's/the franchisee is completely devoid of responsibility because it was "just an employee"?
Hypothetical: If an employee in McDonald's overcharges all the customers do you think that McDonald's/the franchisee is completely devoid of responsibility because it was "just an employee"?
That's a good example. But there's a difference between harming your customers and harming your competitors. In the case of McDonalds' hypothetical actions, the solution is to give your customers their money back and a few free burgers. But what can Google do to make up for their mistake here? Go back in time and not hire the individuals that fucked up?
It's fairly obvious what they should do: apologise publicly and to the people who they misrepresented themselves to.
Not in the Anglosphere where the actual people affected will never know of their wrongdoing.
Not throw their hands up in the air and blame human nature, sorry for the inconvenience.
Every act like this where they do not take a principled stand, dilutes the value of that Don't Be Evil motto a little more, until one day it will essentially be meaningless.
Can we get a little perspective? It's been less than a day since this came to light.
How about giving the people who are investigating a reasonable amount of time to investigate what happened, ferret out who is responsible and and figure out how best to move forward?
You know, up until this comment of yours, it hadn't bothered me that you were an employee of google defending their actions most of the time on HN. I still assumed you were being somewhat objective.
But I have finally lost that trust. It is extremely hard to believe your objectivity when you equate what happened with "pushing the envelope" and "innovation".
- there are people inside of Google, working for Google, that manually accessed web data of Mocality and then phoned Mocality clients making fraudulent claims about Mocality and practically trying to extort the money from the clients. Note that those in Google can't be "just some local Kenyans" as Mocality recored systematic access from Google India after access from Kenya stopped:
http://blog.mocality.co.ke/files/2012/01/both.png
Note also what Mocality logged:
- "8 different user agents mostly running Chrome on Linux"
It's so cries "Google" and it can be much more than eight people doing this, as, for example, all machines where hard disks are duplicated or are simply similarly configured would have the same user agent.
Mocality also estimates that
- "this team were calling 20-25 Mocality business per hour" (http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...)
This is SOO BIG.