Google responds to the Mocality blog post
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- 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.
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.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/google_settlement...
Mocality recorded the calls, the MP3 files are linked in their original post:
http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...
Douglas, Kenyan, so local:
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/mocality-wordpress/audio/...
Deepthi, Indian:
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/mocality-wordpress/audio/...
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.
If the Google people involved were tasked with developing Google's business in Africa, it's not ridiculous at all.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
You're a business and a public one at that... 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.
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
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>
Google is usually straight-forward when they screw up. I'm curious to see what actually happened.
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.
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").
* http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...
How come, when Google India was obviously involved, looking at the post that you link as well?
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.
[1] http://www.metafilter.com/111590/Do-Not-Much-Evil#4128023
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?
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.
I don't know if you are trying to paint him as a racist or if you really are ignorant of Kenya's crime rate
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Same should apply when shit goes bad.
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 :)
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."
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.
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.
Um...no, it's not disingenuous at all.
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.
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."
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'm much more certain that they aren't stupid than I am certain that they aren't evil.
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".
If I were him, I would update that post and put the links to the transcripts in the "conclusions" section.
Kind of amazing, I thought it would turn out it was an unconnected company.
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.
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.
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
"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."
Realistically I don't think there's any legal action they can take - can they?
Also, how does Google "make this right" with them?
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.
It sounds like they were just visiting Mocality's website. Anyone could have done that.
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.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...
In other words, this doesn't surprise me. And it doesn't bother me, either.
The cost of innovation isn't becoming a crook.
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"?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".