Google, what were you thinking?

http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/

by swombat • 15 years ago

751 143 15 years ago

blog.mocality.co.ke

This article is being blocked, even though it has been submitted by 10+ people by now, and seems highly relevant.

Here's the URL: http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/

mooism23• 15 years ago

estel• 15 years ago

http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t... clickable

Must have been submitted at least a hundred times this morning.

EwanToo2• 15 years ago

Seems a very odd situation, I assume the URL has been manually flagged enough times that all submissions to that URL are now marked as spam automatically.

I'd be curious to know who's flagging it though.

alexmuller3• 15 years ago

I left this comment on the original post, but it's been caught by the spam filter there:

Hi Stefan – apologies if I’ve missed something, but the only solid proof I can see that this is actually run by Google is that the IP address some calls came from was assigned to Google.

Last year Mark Turner was concerned that the Department of Defense was listening in on his phone calls because of an IP address that later turned out to not belong to them at all, but (I believe) was being squatted on by Sprint. Couldn’t the same thing be happening here? http://www.markturner.net/2011/11/08/why-is-the-defense-depa...

I wonder whether the scammers aren’t actually employed by Google and are simply out to make a quick buck by pretending they are.

Can anyone speak to the technical aspects of his analysis? I'm not seeing any truly compelling proof that this is run by Google. Just the one IP address that's registered to Mountain View.

russss3• 15 years ago

That Sprint problem was caused by Sprint "borrowing" DoD addresses to use in their internal NATed mobile network. This wouldn't be an issue with a standard web site like Mocality which is directly connected to the Internet, instead of via NAT.

I trust Mocality's technical chops enough to believe that the IP traffic is coming from where they say it's coming from.

As additional proof, the callers claim to be from Google, and Getting Kenyan Businesses Online is a genuine Google initiative. So a lot of things wouldn't add up if it turned out not to be Google behind it.

nl2• 15 years ago

I trust Mocality's technical chops enough to believe that the IP traffic is coming from where they say it's coming from.

I agree with this.

the callers claim to be from Google, and Getting Kenyan Businesses Online is a genuine Google initiative

Claiming to be a member of something legitimate on a phonecall is scamming 101 - it's usually very hard for the person on the other end of the line to verify it immediately.

alexmuller3• 15 years ago

Thanks for clarifying - ok, so there was lots of traffic from a Kenyan IP resulting in phone calls from a "Google employee", followed by traffic from a Google IP resulting in the same.

Perhaps I'm trying too hard to find a way out for Google, but this doesn't add up for me. Things like the Google callers giving out gmail.com addresses rather than their google.com addresses (transcript page 8).

Andaith• 15 years ago

Is there any actual proof that it was google? It sounds to me like someone is borrowing their name for legitimacy.

waitwhat• 15 years ago

Scroll down a bit to "Results (2)": These new accesses were coming directly from Google’s network. The IP address 74.125.63.33 made 17,645 requests (15,554 to BusinessProfile.aspx)

kalleboo• 15 years ago

"Google's network" could also just mean an App Engine user.

russss3• 15 years ago

GKBO appears to be a genuine Google initiative - its domain is registered to Google and served from their nameservers: http://www.kbo.co.ke/

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

This doesn't mean that the people on the other end of the phone actually are employed by Google. They could have heard of the Google initiative and attempted to capitalize on the opportunity.

yanw3• 15 years ago

I'm assuming it was flagged because the headline was in ALL CAPS.

bnr• 15 years ago

    text-transform: uppercase;

There's lowercase text in the DOM.

hellweaver666• 15 years ago

Strangely though, if you copy and paste in Chrome, you get uppercase text, even if it's lowercase in the DOM.

Tichy• 15 years ago

Are those known Google IPs? Otherwise I suppose anybody could just register something as "Google"? Just saying, WHOIS might not be very reliable.

russss3• 15 years ago

WHOIS is generally very reliable - there are identity checks when you register for IP space (especially with ARIN, which is who provides Google's IP space).

One other way you can check is by looking at the organisation handle in the WHOIS - it's GOGL, which is the same org handle as you'll find on all their IP addresses if you WHOIS them. That ties up with the ARIN site:

http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/GOGL

I've done a fair bit of network engineering and I'm convinced that this is actually a Google address.

rmc7• 15 years ago

I upvoted you, but WHOIS is quite reliable for checking domain names. It's also part of a /16 block, i.e. 65,000 IP addresses. They don't just give those out willy-nilly, you need to explain how and why you need them. A 2 bit operation with a name that sounds like a massive internet company can't just get a /16.

Those IP addresses are assigned to Google.

(Obvious caveat, just cause they're assigned to Google doesn't mean this is a Google mandated operation. Other explainations: Rougue Employees, Rouge Outsources, compromised PC in Google office, Google App Engine, etc.)

AndrewDucker2• 15 years ago

I am hoping that this is a rogue group of local Google employees who are about to be smacked down by Google head office.

This kind of thing is going to happen occasionally with global organisations, but Google needs to do something public quickly to make it clear that this is against policy.

mike-cardwell8• 15 years ago

I am hoping the opposite. I am hoping that this was sanctioned by head office, so it destroys their undeserved and harmful, "does no evil," reputation.

bruceboughton• 15 years ago

So you're hoping Google has done something evil so people will think they're evil?!

JS_startup2• 15 years ago

You must not have gotten the memo--HN still has a creepy, starry-eyed obsession with Google and sacrilege like yours will have you burned at the stake :)

latch• 15 years ago

You can't have a "rogue group of local employees". You are accountable for all your employees action - legally and morally. How often has a company done something only to blame it on "contractors" or "a third party". That's not acceptable.

AndrewDucker2• 15 years ago

Oh, absolutely. Google are responsible for oversight of their employees. Someone inside Google isn't doing their job, and heads need to roll here.

mooism23• 15 years ago

Google are responsible for their employees' actions. But there is still a difference between employees doing evil in defiance of management's orders, doing evil as instructed by management, and doing evil in a climate of management neglect.

r00fus• 15 years ago

And the appropriate response is to publicly: admonish the behavior, investigate and report, then reprimand/dismiss the employee(s) who are found guilty.

If Google's management is innocent, then they need to prove so, and show it by acting ethically as described above.

shrikant• 15 years ago

It looks like HN auto-kills *.co.ke links.

EwanToo2• 15 years ago

Impressive, given that's the country code for Kenya :)

.co.ke for companies .or.ke for NGOs .me.ke for personal websites and emails .ac.ke for academic institutions

I wonder if HN had a big spam issue in the past from Kenyan domains?

okal• 15 years ago

Doubtful. .ke domains don't pack that much SEO juice and are a little more expensive than generic TLDs, so I don't see them being appealing for spammers.

CubicleNinjas• 15 years ago

Ha, ha - thank you. I learned something!

Now to go buy some co.ke (domains) to amuse myself.

mjwalshe• 15 years ago

or if google employes where downvoating negative stories it would be interesting to see the ip addresses of any down votes.

normal companies ban employees from participating in online discussions about their company certinaly at British telecom uk.telecom and alt.2600 where off-limits.

Though I was asked by our press office to post an oficial respose to alt.2600 once but SD (security directoy) put a stop to that :-)

rmc7• 15 years ago

Really? That seems very bad form, since it's the country code for a medium sized country with a higher population than Canada.

nicpottier2• 15 years ago

I'm curious to see how this ends up.

The upsell is the part that makes me suspicious, because that doesn't sound like the type of thing that Google would do.

My guess is this. It is someone claiming to be Google and selling a service that is actually free. That's a pretty common thing to see in Africa, in Rwanda we see people 'selling' Google Apps for domains all the time.

The WHOIS lookup does give me pause though.

ma2rten2• 15 years ago

Could the http requests be made from Google App Engine? Then again, why would the scammers go though such hoops.

rmc7• 15 years ago

Hide themselves? It's essentially a form of proxy.

cellis• 15 years ago

For legitimacy. Don't make the mistake of thinking the only people who know about App Engine are San Franciscan hipsters with Macbook Pros. Blackhat hackers stay just as updated on technology trends as everyone else.

nicpottier2• 15 years ago

Reading the complete transcript here: <http://blog.mocality.co.ke/files/2012/01/Incoming_Call-Redac...;

It makes me believe that it is Google, though I still find the monthly hosting charge thing a bit strange, because I can't find any mention of that on their site.

Apart from the false information about Mocality, does Google using their directory to do these cold calls actually violate Mocality's Terms of Use?

Really curious to see Google's response. Joe Muchera (head of Google Kenya) says he's looking into it. That not being an immediate dismissal makes me think it is indeed a Google initiative, though one that went off the rails.

ErrantX2• 15 years ago

To me it reads a lot like a scam. Gmail addresses to send data to, vague comments about cost and features. A lot of bullshit about Google.

We get SEO and "host your website" scam calls now and again (maybe 2 or 3 times a month) - since my boss went to an "SEO & Hosting workshop" sigh - and it sounds a lot like some of them.

rmc7• 15 years ago

Reading the complete transcript here: … It makes me believe that it is Google

How so? I read it and it looked like one of those crappy scams? How does this strike you as a legitimate Google employee?

jontas3• 15 years ago

The post mentions that Google was violating their T&Cs:

When we started this investigation, I thought that we’d catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue.

viking• 15 years ago

The main problem is that the Google representative incorrectly presented the offer as a partnership with Mocality. This is clearly fraud as the Google representative is using the business owners trust in Mocality to sell a competitors product, using a non-existing Google-Mocality partnership as a selling point.

cjhopman• 15 years ago

Really?

I think that transcript essentially proves that it wasn't Google. Everything he says about the program is completely wrong. I'll just pick out the things that are indisputably wrong, there is more that I would argue is wrong but may be viewed differently by others. You've already mentioned the false information about Mocality that the caller uses, so I don't need to repeat that.

"[The domain will be] ww.your business.CO.KE" No, it will be www.your business.kbo.co.ke. This is something very important, you get a subdomain of Google's Kenyan Business Online site kbo.co.ke.

"Twenty one days. We’re going to develop the website within twenty one days" No. Google's KBO does not develop the websites themselves, they provide a "Business Sitebuilder tool" that allows you to do it yourself.

"XXXXX dot XXXXX at gmail dot com." This should be @google.com not @gmail.com.

"and also we go on facebook. People who log into facebook can see the clothes you are selling." No. Google's KBO does not do anything with Facebook.

"When someone is on facebook, they’ll see your ad there." Again, no. Google is not giving you advertising space on Facebook.

"Ok, there’s a small fee for hosting of Ksh. 200 per month. [...] Only that for hosting. You know hosting is different from developing." No, there is no hosting fee. The only possible fee is an optional one if you want your own domain and it isn't 200 per month.

There's more but I think that should give you the general idea. Given just this transcript and comparing it to the details of Google's program at kbo.co.ke I would say that this caller is definitely not working for Google but is rather a scammer. In fact, in this transcript the caller basically walks through the steps needed to use the Business Sitebuilder tool. This explains how the business who didn't agree to the thing would end up with a site anyway, the scammer did it while on the phone. Now, I haven't considered the IP logs, but my best guess for that is that it is coming from Google Translate as discussed elsewhere.

Edit: I should clarify. I am not certain that Google was not involved with this, it's more that I am convinced that that particular caller wasn't working for Google. While I am unconvinced that these callers worked for Google, there is some rather damning evidence.

henrikschroder• 15 years ago

> It is someone claiming to be Google and selling a service that is actually free. That's a pretty common thing to see in Africa

I bet it's pretty common everywhere, I know it happens in Sweden regularly, although the scam companies are shut down pretty quickly over here.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

"The upsell is the part that makes me suspicious, because that doesn't sound like the type of thing that Google would do."

You haven't worked with their sales team then. Sales people (Commissionus Salesdroidicus :-) live and breath to win, and winning means creating leads, converting leads, and booking business.

Hopefully the folks inside Google who believe in transparency and doing business competitively but honestly, will be able to pressure the teams who endorse this sort of activity.

The next step will be the more interesting one. Do they they stop scraping Mocality? Do they enter into a dialog to actually partner with them? Or do they start using Tor nodes to scrape the site and stop telling people they are from Google?

When that next chapter plays out the true nature of the business is revealed.

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

Curious: If I had a Google App Engine account, a) could I open outbound HTTP connections, and b) what IP range would I appear to be coming from?

Not that I find it unbelieveable that Google, multinational megacorp, could and would do this thing, but this evidence still seems kinda circumstantial. I mean, here's hypothesis two: One compromised PC in Google's HQ, running a proxy.

sern• 15 years ago

You can fetch web pages and you'll appear as coming from a Google IP, but your user agent header will contain "AppEngine-Google".

acqq• 15 years ago

And "AppEngine-Google" user agents were not logged:

http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...

jontas3• 15 years ago

I'm not familiar with AppEngine at all, but could you really not craft your own headers? Isn't it python's urlib or similar?

mkl• 15 years ago

Seems like you can set the user agent: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2743521/how-to-change-use...

rcfox• 15 years ago

How would you make money from that though? "Please make the cheque out to Google Kenya, spelled C-A-S-H."

mooism23• 15 years ago

"SMS your payment to this number..."?

rmc7• 15 years ago

Something like that. Or send it to this PayPal address or post the cash to here, or ring this premium number, or put your credit card details into http://random.something.sdfsdfsd.com, etc.

There are many people who are flumoxed and confused by computers that we've trained them to let most of their guard down, and scammers can get away with "Oh our system is broken, just use this paypal address" will probably work.

instakill• 15 years ago

I'm really surprised that nobody from Google has made a statement yet. Even if the detective work was wrong, Google has suffered a huge PR blow. This story is all over HN, all over G+ (at least the HN circle), all over my Twitter stream (which includes some top tech journos from South Africa) and is slowly being republishing on various blogs.

Google needs to respond now!

rmc7• 15 years ago

The first part sounds pretty circumstancial, since pretending to be from a big company (Google) is a basic scamming technique.

However the second instance is from part of a /16 IPv4 block assigned to Google. It could just be a compromised proxy on someone's machine.

richoakley• 15 years ago

You don't think it is a bit ridiculous that somebody, pretending to be Google, would go to the effort of running requests through Google App Engine, just in case somebody ran a trace against the logs in the hope of figuring out where the IP address was? All evidence points at Google and the likelihood that that's as a result of some serious planning by a paranoid scammer is unlikely.

joshz• 15 years ago

According to this post Google knows and will have a statement soon.

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/13/google-fraudulently-solicit...

ck2• 15 years ago

Are you sure some other entity didn't just figure out how to use google as a proxy, ie. via their translator tool?

tripzilch3• 15 years ago

Coming from a Google IP isn't the biggest clue (though the second one from India seems pretty damning), they also say they work for Google and then try to sell those businesses websites from Google.

If it was some other entity, why'd they sell Google-built websites?

trapped123• 15 years ago

This is what I don't like about Google. They would like to extract content from others for free and then use it for their own profit. But they don't allow others to extract content from their sites or charge exorbitantly to use their APIs. They give something for free only if they can make money by selling ads or if they can capture user behavior.

orijing• 15 years ago

They are also a public company that generates profits for shareholders.

Eliezer2• 15 years ago

Anyone who thinks this is an actual plot by Google, seriously, you need to notice your own confusion. It doesn't fit the modus operandi of any other way they make money.

brudgers3• 15 years ago

If Mocality's assertion that the only way to directly build a directory of Kenyan businesses is boots on the ground, then either Google must put boots on the ground or build their directory indirectly.

Let's assume that Google chose to put boots on the ground - what then is the most efficient way for those people to build a directory? It seems to me that utilizing Mocality's existing directory would at least be considered - Google's modus operandi has always been aggregating whatever is on the web and presenting it as their product.

"Getting Kenyan Businesses Online" is a Google project and among it's partner benefits are:

    Opportunity to offer relevant value-added 
    products/services that bolt onto the Google offering
    in support of SMB business growth

    Ability to run own events and drive participation
    across own customer base co-branded with Google

[http://www.kbo.co.ke/partnerbenefits]

The Next Web's Coverage of Google's kickoff stated:

According to Google, together with its partners, “GKBO will provide free or subsidized services to help businesses to use web and internet technologies. This includes supporting organizations that provide assistance for small and medium businesses, as well as other industry organizations that are aligned with the aims of the initiative.”

Note that the services are not necessarily free and that Google will partner with whoever it sees fit.

[http://thenextweb.com/africa/2011/09/12/google-launches-prog...]

There's nothing in the allegations which is inconsistent with Google's M.O. of aggregating other people's data on the web and encouraging people to put more information online.

swombat2• 15 years ago

It would be a million times cheaper and simpler for Google to acquire Mocality outright than to do what is being claimed they have done.

I also don't believe that they have actually done this (but it'll be interesting to see this story unfold).

ceol2• 15 years ago

This is rather indirect, but didn't Google try to purchase Yelp a while ago? And isn't Yelp known for trying to extort business owners?

randallsquared• 15 years ago

Now that they've officially admitted that they were doing it, have you "noticed your confusion"? No amount of poor fit with previous actions offsets admitting that a Google team was actually doing this, no matter how inefficient it seems to us to have been doing it. :/

caspianm• 15 years ago

I still don't feel like I know the relationship between the perpetrators and google. Subcontractors, employees, or what? But I would be surprised for that apology to happen if there was no relationship other than impersonation.

Eliezer2• 15 years ago

Yep, I confess I take a probability-hit on this one. I'm surprised; it's hard to make out who within Google was benefiting by going rogue. (I maintain that if Larry Page knew about this I'll eat a small edible hat.)

wildmXranat• 15 years ago

Well, somebody will either get a smack upside the head or a raise. This is a blemish if proven to be a Google operation and there's no way subversive tactics of this kind are looked upon with good grace.

Loic• 15 years ago

The history tells us that Google subsidiaries have quite a level of freedom to have their own strategy to achieve the desired outcomes. You can remember the paid blog posts for google.jp for example. So, Google Kenya will be kind of banned or whatever and mea-culpa will come out, life will go on.

What I find more interesting if everything is true, is that they have cheap manual workers in India doing the scrapping manually to then cold call. It means that if their "crawlers" are not smart enough, they are ready to go "manual" to enter a market.

For me this is really an interesting piece of news and this is where I am a bit afraid of Google hegemony.

boscomutunga• 15 years ago

Well, it will be interesting to hear what google has to say but meanwhile there seems to be a lot of people with axes to grind with google.On the other hand, what's taking so long, google should have given a statement on the issue.

samlev3• 15 years ago

There's a couple of reasons why I think this doesn't seem quite right:

- "Large human effort" doesn't seem like Google's style - a screen scrape for info would be faster for them, and I'd assume that they already have tools built to do that.

- If the callers are lying about being affiliated with mocality, then why can't we assume that they might also be lying about being from Google?

- Google would likely have the entire site indexed and cached already, so there's very little reason for them to get actual people to manually screen-scrape the live site.

- OK, the second wave is coming from a Google IP, but why wasn't the first wave coming from one?

Yeah, it looks pretty bad, but this type of behaviour is so atypical of Google. It seems almost laughable to make the assumption that it's anything other than scammers trying to take advantage of Google announcements to try to make a quick/easy buck by selling Google services as an affiliate.

cloudwalking3• 15 years ago

I'm also very curious what services the callers were offering. Are they services Google offers? Services Google charges for?

cloudwalking3• 15 years ago

Ok, after reading over this transcript, it's clearly a scam unrelated to Google: http://blog.mocality.co.ke/files/2012/01/Incoming_Call-Redac...

1. Google doesn't offer website creation. 2. Google doesn't charge for low-traffic hosting. 3. Google wouldn't setup your website via email.

samlev3• 15 years ago

I'm assuming that they're offering google apps, which you can sell as an affiliate (naming your price). But reading through the transcript, and listening to the calls, they claim to be offering to "develop" a web site for the business, which I very much doubt google would ever do.

They have tools in google apps for making pages/simple sites, but everything about the call stinks of scam.

> Caller: Twenty one days. We're going to develop the website within twenty one days

When has google ever "developed websites" for independent companies?

  Caller: XXXXX, and do you have a gmai account?*
  Business owner: yes, I do have a gmail account.
  Caller: Kindly give me your gmail account.
  ...
  Caller: ... you will be given a personal password which you can use to log in and make changes in case you want to.
  ...
  Caller: ... For photos, I will give you my gmail account so you can forward to me either the business logo or the photos you feel have nice looking clothes that can attract customers.

Yes, I've cherry-picked some of the transcript, but the point is that these are practices which aren't just against Google's "Do no evil" policy, but would be counter to how they would actually run. For a company like google, with their existing infrastructure, this would just be bad business.

Also, why ask for a gmail username, and then say later "Well we'll send you a username and password once we're done". It doesn't make any sense.

Oh well, I assume that at some point, Google will be forced to respond, will give a big "What the hell, guys, this wasn't us", and then everyone will look sheepish for a while until a year later where some blogger will stumble on it again, and try to expose the truth of "google being evil in africa".

AznHisoka• 15 years ago

As an aside, there's a good business idea hidden in this: a website monitoring service that monitors for scrapers, showing you hit rates for IPs, which countries, user agents, what pages, etc. Sends you a SMS or email when it detects a scraper and you can take action.

billpatrianakos• 15 years ago

No need to circumvent. This is already the top story.

blhack3• 15 years ago

Oh, malarky.

Here. I set up a page at http://lab2.gibsonandlily.com/google.html

Then I ran it through google translation services. Here is the result in apache's log:

74.125.16.18 - - [13/Jan/2012:10:45:37 -0600] "GET /google.html HTTP/1.1" 200 327 "http://translate.google.com/translate_p?hl=en&sl=fr&... "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.75 Safari/535.7,gzip(gfe)

Look familiar? This one is tossing up windows NT, which is strange, but it doesn't seem like a stretch that some of the machines at google for stuff like this are running linux.

The scam here isn't being done by google, it's just a run-of-the-mill scammer scamming and using google's name.

Dearest mocotality. Turning on referals in apache logs and you'll see where on google this is coming from (if you care to).

Here is how:

in: /etc/apache2/apache2.conf (or whereever your apache configuration sits) change the "Logformat" option to the following:

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %O \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

and then use option:

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access_log combined

(or whatever log path you want).

DEinspanjer• 15 years ago

Not sure if I'd jump straight to malarky, but I definitely think it is very plausible that a scamming outfit is running the pages through translate, either as an obfuscation or actual translation.

z92• 15 years ago

That sounds very plausible.

powertower• 15 years ago

> it's just a run-of-the-mill scammer scamming and using google's name

A scammer selling a Google service for which their is no affiliate program?

I wouldn't file this one away due to having a Google crawler on an IP address that’s on the same B block (that's like having the same car brand, not the same make/model)... An IP address that's not even related to the original investigation, but to some anecdote at the very end of the story.

We need more info about the service being sold, and how it's being sold, who's the billing party, etc.

blhack3• 15 years ago

The scammer invented their own referral program by charging the businesses for a website.

The only real tie to google here is that some person on a telephone used google's name.

alexmuller3• 15 years ago

From the PDF transcript, page nine:

Caller: No, it’s absolutely free, free of charge. Ok, there’s a small fee for hosting of Ksh. 200 per month.

This seems like an incredibly simple scam, and it looks like blhack's nailed it.

There is nothing connecting this to Google apart from that one IP address. I could phone up half a dozen companies and claim to be from Google, too. Hell, I get phone calls from "Windows Security Centre" every few weeks telling me to do something to my non-existant XP install.

ma2rten2• 15 years ago

> Look familiar? This one is tossing up windows NT, which is strange, but it doesn't seem like a stretch that some of the machines at google for stuff like this are running linux.

This is actually your user agent, isn't it? Google is probably forwarding your user agent string, so that you get a page that is optimized for your browser.

blhack3• 15 years ago

That's an excellent point, and actually complete's the loop on the story.

The machines that this scammer is using run linux, which explains why the user agent reported this both when they were reading the pages directly, and when the started using google translate.

Neat. I hope they follow up by taking my advice and including the referal so we get to see exactly where it's coming from.

X-Istence• 15 years ago

For me it did forward my user agent.

linguistbreaker• 15 years ago

Those Kenyan businesses don't represent enough money to be worth bungling into a crushing PR nightmare. That would be stupid, and stupid is the one thing that I know to be absent at Google. I predict that Google will get to the bottom of this very quickly in order to protect their name.

yanw3• 15 years ago

Google's statement via: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-google-investigating-keny...

We were mortified to learn that 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.

We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. 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.

JS_startup2• 15 years ago

This needs to be at the top. Google confirms that it was their representatives who pulled off the scam, not someone posing as Google. We can all stop making excuses for them now

jcslzr• 15 years ago

Well some people at Google were dishonest, like in any other organization in the world.

I wonder if its also dishonest people working in search results...

fred_nada• 15 years ago

The funny thing is everyone continues to make excuses. Already 2 in the past 5 minutes...

notatoad• 15 years ago

It is at the top. And also in the article. Please don't make "this needs to be at the top" comments, and just use the arrows. That's what they're for.

sek• 15 years ago

We should accept that Google has many employees and some of them are black sheep.

They are not perfect, but they seem very transparent by admitting it.

lancewiggs• 15 years ago

To summarize what we know, think we know and the open questions are:

What we know:

1: Google employees or contractors or partners did this (called Mocality listed businesses, said they were from Google/Mocality and sold websites etc.)

2: Apparently they were a rogue person/team/unit inside of Google

3: But there seemed to be a lot of callers involved

4: They moved the calling unit to India

5: Google HQ now knows about this

Speculation

1: Nobody in Google HQ knew about this at the time

2: The person or people involved in Google Kenya were quite high up to be able to motivate that many people

3: The India team was not part of Google's team. (or perhaps they were). They got involved because the heat was on in Kenya.

4: Mocality suffered a loss here (e.g. use of data to be used to solicit businesses against their terms and conditions), the people doing so were at Google and representing Google and thus Google has opened themselves up for a considerable legal mess.

5: The Nigerian courts and legal system are too hard/expensive/slow for Mocality and Google to navigate, so Mocality have turned to PR to motivate Google to change.

6: That approach is working, and it should be working. Google needs to do something urgently to fix this.

7: Getting rid of the partners is insufficient remedy for Mocality. There needs to be some compensation involved for the solicitation of a considerable percentage of Mocality's listings.

8: Ultimately the best way for Google to handle this is to purchase Mocality.

Questions

1:Was the India team a Google team one or outsourced to some rascals there?

2: What will Google do to compensate Mocality of this scam?

3: Has Mocality retained a lawyer in Nigeria, have they formally asked Google to Cease and Desist and requested compensation?

4: Why has Google not approached Mocality wrt purchase of their data?

5: Who has the relationship with any businesses that did sign up to the scammers? What will happen to that relationship and to the money paid?

ww520• 15 years ago

Kudos to Google for owning up to it rather than shifting blame to others. I wonder what kind of internal control Google has. Google is big enough that some of the internal/external auditing controls needed to be in place.

spIrr• 15 years ago

Indeed, since they are on US SE (NYSE?), they are required to implement internal controls under Sarbanes-Oxley Act and they should be indeed audited by a third-party auditor (E&Y, if i recall correctly), including attestation of the controls. And, to best of my knowledge, the actions described in this article do have to be authorized by the top management of Google or by Head of the respective Department (the Control procedure), since this involves a material amount of expenses and also represents a revenue component. Now, E&Y should do they work and investigate the reason for this 'failure' of controls, as Google states and it wouldn't be bad if the PCAOB will be involved with a review of E&Y.

ak2012• 15 years ago

Google monopoly hard at work, its only a matter of time till we start viewing Google as the next Microsoft.

kenrik• 15 years ago

"Do no evil"

There is a saying in spanish that roughly translates "beware of unrequested affirmations"

I think it applies here..

wangweij• 15 years ago

If Google has become so huge that theoretically they cannot enforce the "Do No Evil" motto throughout the whole company, they can remove that motto and publicly admit they are just the same as any other one.

TerraHertz• 15 years ago

OK, now this is just exploring an idea about WHY this might have been done.

Rough details:

Google doesn't develop business web sites, but the callers were offering that service.

Obtaining their business contact database, and misrepresenting themselves, in a very un-Google way.

Since early November 2011. And the call operation switched to India when spotted.

The businesses being called were all in Kenya. KENYA - now why does that ring a bell?

Google admits it happened, but is vague about who did it. "a team of people working on a Google project"

Hmmm... You'd think if there was a clear relationship that Google could admit to, they would have. I smell something a bit more intense than mere bad business choices.

How about this:

Suppose you were a current US President, who (for whatever reason) very very strongly desired to eliminate (or 'modify') a specific piece of paper held at the Coast Province General Hospital, Kenya. A birth certificate, from 1961. This one: http://everist.org/pics/Obama_bc/lucas_Obama_bc.jpg

Someone comes up with the bright idea to offer a document digitizing and cloud archiving service to the hospital. Just to get hands-on for that one piece of paper.

But as cover... you'd need something much more general. Like offering web hosting to all businesses in Kenya. Comes with document scanning at low low prices! You can trust us, we’re GOOGLE! And we are associates of your widely liked Mocality.

So why now? Because finally a lawsuit about Obama's eligibility established legal standing and made it to the supreme court. Document discovery begins. Stuff's about to hit the ventilators...

20120113 VERY QUIETLY OBAMA’S CITIZENSHIP CASE REACHES THE SUPREME COURT http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/01/09/very-quietly-obamas-...

That and other cases have been working their way through slowly. Takes months, and someone maybe saw a need and activated some emergency contingency plans.

Just a thought. There’s always a reason, and it's often not the most obvious one.

Why would any actual Google team, even rogue, offer web services Google simply does not do?

Google, what were you thinking?

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