>"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.