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Google responds to the Mocality blog post

380 points by thehodge 15y ago

thehodge 15y ago
The above url is a Google Plus post from a VP at Google (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nelson-mattos/4/703/430 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nelson-mattos/4/703/430)
- flatline 15y ago
  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.
alphadog 15y ago
So what happens next? Realistically I don't think there's any legal action they can take - can they? Also, how does Google "make this right" with them?
- leak 15y ago
  As far as legal action, Google employees violated Mocality 's Terms & Condition so maybe legal action is possible.
  - jnbiche 15y ago
    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.
    - WettowelReactor 15y ago
      If so this is exactly the kind of thing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was invented for.
peterb 15y ago
He chose his words carefully. He didn't say this was done by Google employees, but "a team of people" working on a Google project. Google is usually straight-forward when they screw up. I'm curious to see what actually happened.
- potatolicious 15y ago
  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.
  - michaelcampbell 15y ago
    Maybe they will, when they know the facts from all concerned. Seems a bit premature to do anything of substance just yet.
  - Steko 15y ago
    "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/ http://www.kbo.co.ke/ ("managed by Google"). * http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/ http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...
    - Groxx 15y ago
      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.
swombat 15y ago
Well, that deserves a +1. Kind of amazing, I thought it would turn out it was an unconnected company.
- brudgers 15y ago
  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.
  - AznHisoka 15y ago
    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?
    - chrisacky 15y ago
      AznHisoka: What did AirBnB do with CraigsList?
      - alex_c 15y ago
        Random link on the topic: http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craigslist/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craig...
      - juddlyon 15y ago
        http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craigslist/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craig...
brudgers 15y ago
>"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.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  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.
  - AznHisoka 15y ago
    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.
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      >that means you'll do anything for profit, just like every other company. As a company director I repudiate this so hard. Most companies? Most-probably. Every company? Not at all.
cpdean 15y ago
tl;dr (kinda skimmed, correct me if I'm wrong) 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.
- sp332 15y ago
  Not quite right. Kenyan businesses opt-in to listing on Mocality, for free. The Google employees called up businesses on the list, claimed that Mocality was owned by Google, and tried to upsell some web pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033 "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."
- a-priori 15y ago
  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.
badclient 15y ago
Oh hey, let's use this bad story about google to drive some traffic to google+.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- 1point2 15y ago
  It seems http://www.kbo.co.ke/ 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.
peterwwillis 15y ago
A comment on the G+ post from Joshua Mwaniki: 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.
redxaxder 15y ago
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: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&biw=1270&bih=726&source=hp&q=cache%3Awhatismyip.com&pbx=1&oq=cache%3Awhatismyip.com&aq=f&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1357l8049l0l8315l22l5l0l0l0l0l331l1446l2-2.3l5l0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...
- potatolicious 15y ago
  Except, Google has already admitted this was theirs. Perhaps rogue employees within Google, but definitely not an unrelated third party.
  - napierzaza 15y ago
    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.
    - jrockway 15y ago
      Google is not 100% perfect. If things aren't broken, you're not trying hard enough to push the envelope. The cost of innovation is failure. In other words, this doesn't surprise me. And it doesn't bother me, either.
      - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
        It doesn't bother you if Google, the company, is committing crimes? The cost of innovation isn't becoming a crook.
        jrockway 15y ago
        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.
Aloisius 15y ago
Uh, wasn't this fraud? And isn't that criminal? As in jail time not just being fired? If I said I had a fake partnership with Google and started calling up their customers for my competing website, I'm pretty certain I would go to jail.
- jrockway 15y ago
  I'm pretty certain I would go to jail. 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.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    Thing is that Google (and those like them) bring a lot of revenue to boost your GDP. Picking up a cell-phone left in a bar shouldn't get a whole platoon of police officers mobilised either (eg http://www.pcworld.com/article/195006/police_seize_gizmodo_editors_tech_gear.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/195006/police_seize_gizmodo_e...). 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.
acqq 15y ago
So Nelson Mattos (http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=21751034&ticker=GOOG:US http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/per...) confirms that what Mocality diagnosed is correct: - 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 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-thinking/ http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...) This is SOO BIG.
- Tichy 15y ago
  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.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    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.
    - Eliezer 15y ago
      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".
aidenn0 15y ago
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.
zobzu 15y ago
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.
- Flenser 15y ago
  * The point is that any employee of Google can access such data.* It sounds like they were just visiting Mocality's website. Anyone could have done that.
- mdwrigh2 15y ago
  "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.
rmc 15y ago
What's fascinating is what wasn't said. What's wasn't said was "This is nothing to do with us, this was someone unconnected to Google".
codeonfire 15y ago
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.
- myko 15y ago
  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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
71104 15y ago
I wonder what the "appropriate action" will consist of.
fred_nada 15y ago
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-61234 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.
biafra 15y ago
It seems Iridium Interactive was the contracted company that called Mocalitys clients: http://www.techmtaa.com/2012/01/13/mocality-accuses-google-of-playing-dirty-to-win-kenyan-businesses/ http://www.techmtaa.com/2012/01/13/mocality-accuses-google-o... "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."
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

380 points by thehodge 15y ago

The above url is a Google Plus post from a VP at Google (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nelson-mattos/4/703/430 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nelson-mattos/4/703/430)

flatline 15y ago
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.

alphadog 15y ago

So what happens next? Realistically I don't think there's any legal action they can take - can they? Also, how does Google "make this right" with them?

leak 15y ago
As far as legal action, Google employees violated Mocality 's Terms & Condition so maybe legal action is possible.
- jnbiche 15y ago
  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.
  - WettowelReactor 15y ago
    If so this is exactly the kind of thing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was invented for.

peterb 15y ago

He chose his words carefully. He didn't say this was done by Google employees, but "a team of people" working on a Google project. Google is usually straight-forward when they screw up. I'm curious to see what actually happened.

potatolicious 15y ago
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.
- michaelcampbell 15y ago
  Maybe they will, when they know the facts from all concerned. Seems a bit premature to do anything of substance just yet.
- Steko 15y ago
  "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/ http://www.kbo.co.ke/ ("managed by Google"). * http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/ http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...
  - Groxx 15y ago
    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.

swombat 15y ago

Well, that deserves a +1. Kind of amazing, I thought it would turn out it was an unconnected company.

brudgers 15y ago
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.
- AznHisoka 15y ago
  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?
  - chrisacky 15y ago
    AznHisoka: What did AirBnB do with CraigsList?
    - alex_c 15y ago
      Random link on the topic: http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craigslist/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craig...
    - juddlyon 15y ago
      http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craigslist/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/02/airbnb-admits-gaming-craig...

brudgers 15y ago

>"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.

kenjackson 15y ago
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.
- AznHisoka 15y ago
  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.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    >that means you'll do anything for profit, just like every other company. As a company director I repudiate this so hard. Most companies? Most-probably. Every company? Not at all.

cpdean 15y ago

tl;dr (kinda skimmed, correct me if I'm wrong) 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.

sp332 15y ago
Not quite right. Kenyan businesses opt-in to listing on Mocality, for free. The Google employees called up businesses on the list, claimed that Mocality was owned by Google, and tried to upsell some web pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460033 "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."
a-priori 15y ago
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.

badclient 15y ago

Oh hey, let's use this bad story about google to drive some traffic to google+.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
1point2 15y ago
It seems http://www.kbo.co.ke/ 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.

peterwwillis 15y ago

A comment on the G+ post from Joshua Mwaniki: 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.

redxaxder 15y ago

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: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&biw=1270&bih=726&source=hp&q=cache%3Awhatismyip.com&pbx=1&oq=cache%3Awhatismyip.com&aq=f&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1357l8049l0l8315l22l5l0l0l0l0l331l1446l2-2.3l5l0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...

potatolicious 15y ago
Except, Google has already admitted this was theirs. Perhaps rogue employees within Google, but definitely not an unrelated third party.
- napierzaza 15y ago
  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.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    Google is not 100% perfect. If things aren't broken, you're not trying hard enough to push the envelope. The cost of innovation is failure. In other words, this doesn't surprise me. And it doesn't bother me, either.
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      It doesn't bother you if Google, the company, is committing crimes? The cost of innovation isn't becoming a crook.
      - jrockway 15y ago
        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.

Aloisius 15y ago

Uh, wasn't this fraud? And isn't that criminal? As in jail time not just being fired? If I said I had a fake partnership with Google and started calling up their customers for my competing website, I'm pretty certain I would go to jail.

jrockway 15y ago
I'm pretty certain I would go to jail. 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.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  Thing is that Google (and those like them) bring a lot of revenue to boost your GDP. Picking up a cell-phone left in a bar shouldn't get a whole platoon of police officers mobilised either (eg http://www.pcworld.com/article/195006/police_seize_gizmodo_editors_tech_gear.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/195006/police_seize_gizmodo_e...). 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.

acqq 15y ago

So Nelson Mattos (http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=21751034&ticker=GOOG:US http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/per...) confirms that what Mocality diagnosed is correct: - 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 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-thinking/ http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...) This is SOO BIG.

Tichy 15y ago
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.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  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.
  - Eliezer 15y ago
    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".

aidenn0 15y ago

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.

zobzu 15y ago

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.

Flenser 15y ago
* The point is that any employee of Google can access such data.* It sounds like they were just visiting Mocality's website. Anyone could have done that.
mdwrigh2 15y ago
"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.

rmc 15y ago

What's fascinating is what wasn't said. What's wasn't said was "This is nothing to do with us, this was someone unconnected to Google".

codeonfire 15y ago

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.

myko 15y ago
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.
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71104 15y ago

I wonder what the "appropriate action" will consist of.

fred_nada 15y ago

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-61234 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.

biafra 15y ago

It seems Iridium Interactive was the contracted company that called Mocalitys clients: http://www.techmtaa.com/2012/01/13/mocality-accuses-google-of-playing-dirty-to-win-kenyan-businesses/ http://www.techmtaa.com/2012/01/13/mocality-accuses-google-o... "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."

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